Seed Synergy | high times

Exhaling a deep puff of a Joint Blueberry Cookies grown by City Farmers BCN, the smoke of my puff travels up into the rafters of a 16th-century Modernist palace in the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. As the smoke rises, I reflect on the meaning of the moment and celebrate the freedom to enjoy weed in a country where cannabis still exists in a gray area, decriminalized for personal use and cultivation but illegal for commercial sale. I’m in Barcelona, ​​​​Spain for an international meeting focused on cannabis genetics. More specifically, I’m at the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum at a party celebrating the combined effort that bridged a national-international divide to unite two storied cannabis seed companies, Sensi Seeds and Humboldt Seed Company. In their collaboration, a new chapter in the history of marijuana begins, one that continues the tradition of the legendary merging of Californian and European genetics that began in the 1970s when hybridization of cannabis began.

Courtesy of Hash Marijuana & Hemp Museum

The collaborative project is called Breeding Grounds and resulted in the release of four new feminized seeds: The Bird (OG Kush x Humboldt Dream x Larry Bird), Auto Pineapple Kush Cake (Pineapple Muffin autoflower x Banana Kush Cake autoflower), Auto Amnesia Jelly (Mint Jelly Autoflower x Amnesia Autoflower XXL), and one that falls within the very popular and highly acclaimed Z-terpene family Purple Berry Muffinz (Purple Bud x Blueberry Muffin x Zkittlez). But arguably more significant than the lineage of the new cannabis strains is the symbolism of what they represent. Sensi Seeds, which inherited the genetics of the world’s first cannabis seed bank – The Seed Bank of Holland from Nevil Schoenmakers – brought to the world classic strains like the sativa-dominant Jack Herer and has been selling cannabis seeds from its home base in the Netherlands since the 1980’s. Founded in 2001 in California’s Emerald Triangle, Humboldt Seed Company has built a reputation as a trusted breeder through massive pheno hunts and award-winning cannabis such as their signature Blueberry Muffin strain. The merger of the two companies in 2023 dates back to the early days of cannabis breeding in the 1970s, when people like Sam the Skunkman and Ed Rosenthal became the catalysts for the merging of European and Californian cannabis genetics, an action that produced the world’s first cannabis hybrids .

seedThe Bird / Courtesy of Humboldt Seed Company

“When I first heard about The Seed Bank, the precursor to Sensi Seeds, my uncle had a shed where he kept all the gardening tools and in that shed he hid High Times magazines and I remember I I snuck in his shed – because we sometimes borrowed weed from our uncle – and we look at his High Times and in the back of High Times we saw an ad for The Seed Bank,” explains Benjamin Lind, co-founder and chief scientific officer the Humboldt Seed Company. “And it just clicked like, ‘Whoa, you can actually order seeds.'”

From a young age, Lind watched his family members create their own cannabis hybrids and learned the importance of seeds to ensure next year’s harvest. Sensi Seeds, he says early one morning while eating lychee fruit he bought at one of Barcelona’s famous food markets, was the first cannabis seed company to ever come into his vision. And when, decades later, he met the people behind the company and toured their facility, he learned that the breeding work they had done was consistent with his own.

Ben Lind / Photo by Mike Rosatti

“Many of our processes are very similar,” he says. “All breeders approach cannabis breeding differently and very few share similar beliefs or similar philosophies, but we’re a really good match.”

This meeting of two like minds in the cannabis breeding world was more than a coincidence, it is the result of years of effort by none other than cannabis cultivation expert Ed Rosenthal, who tells me he’s finished writing books and is now more interested in acquisitions and mergers. Rosenthal’s relationship with Sensi Seeds goes back years. A mutual friend who ran a cannabis club and magazine introduced Rosenthal to Sensi Seeds founder Ben Dronkers in the 1980s. After introducing themselves, the two began collaborating on a museum in Amsterdam dedicated to the history of the cannabis plant, which first opened in 1987.

“Same time Nevil [Schoenmakers] was indicted, so he sold his business, The Seed Bank [Sensi Seeds] and he escaped into the wilds of Australia and was never brought to the US,” explains Rosenthal. “We stayed close and then [Dronkers] hired me to do things at different times off and on and then poured, I think, $50,000 to $100,000 into my defense.”

The defense Rosenthal is referring to was a federal trial that began in the early 2000s when he was found guilty of three felonies related to growing and selling marijuana. After the trial, the jury — who had not been provided with crucial information that Rosenthal had been contracted by the city of Oakland, California to grow medical marijuana — denounced their verdict, and in 2003 Rosenthal eventually became one day in prison. time served.

Rosenthal calls Sensi Seeds, now run by Dronker’s son Ravi Dronkers, an “old family” and says seeing how they interacted with Humboldt Seed Company made him realize that “the cultures aren’t all that different “ be.

“I knew this was the right path and I just did everything I could to not mess it up,” he says. “I’m very glad about that. This is going to be very big.”

The collaboration was announced in mid-March at the second edition of the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum in Barcelona, ​​and included cava flutes alongside a bowl of Spanish-grown blueberry biscuits for guests to roll their own joints. Among the guests in attendance was Jack Herer’s son Dan Herer, who was spotted photographing a framed picture of his father on display in one of the hemp rooms. In a country that lives on the legal gray market for cannabis, smoking and enjoying flowers and concentrates takes place in private, cannabis-friendly clubs and rooms. This clearly includes the cannabis-themed museum during a private event, but also restaurants that roll down their roller doors to offer guests the discretion to smoke weed at the table while the staff are also lit.

Courtesy Humboldt Seed Company

During an evening candid discussion after one of those smoky dinners in Barcelona, ​​Rosenthal strikes up a conversation about cannabis breeding with Nathaniel Pennington, co-founder and CEO of Humboldt Seed Company. The basics of cannabis breeding involve creating new botanical expressions by crossing or pollinating the female flower with pollen from a male plant. An F1, or first generation, occurs when breeders cross two landraces—strains native to certain regions that were not bred—or when breeders cross two inbred lines. The final hybridized result, published by reputable seed companies, comes after at least four generations of inbreeding. The reason the lines are inbred, or bred from plants that share similar genetics, is to stabilize the seeds to ensure that once the seeds have grown into plants they will retain similar physical traits. Cannabis plants have a complex DNA set, and like two sisters from the same family, when two strains are brought together the results will not be genetically identical, but rather similar but distinct expressions known as phenotypes. The art of making cannabis seeds involves the tedious work of reaching a point where the expression of all seeds is equal, a process known as stabilizing genetics.

(From left) Ben Lind, Ravi Dronkers, Nathaniel Pennington and Sander Landsaat celebrate their seed collaboration project at the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum in Barcelona, ​​Spain. / Courtesy Humboldt Seed Company

“Breeding isn’t really a science until it’s repeatable,” Pennington explains. “[True breeding doesn’t occur] until you can do the same experiment, which I would say is the same seed population times the same seed population and find the same phenotypic result. And if you can’t reproduce that experiment, you haven’t really accomplished anything other than creating a cloning line that can be cloned forever, but that’s a bit of a handicap if you ask me.”

In a world full of companies making dubious claims about the stability of their seed lines, some companies like Sensi Seeds and Humboldt Seed Company are sticking to the science. In doing so, these seed banks bless humanity with reliable strains that cross oceans and territorial borders to contribute to the diverse genetic expression of the world’s most beloved flower.

“Both our families have worked for generations to obtain the very best lines and bring them to the modern market,” Lind said in a press release about the Breeding Grounds project. “We both grew up on different continents with different selection pressures. Although we live on one world we have a very similar philosophy based on love and respect for the plant. It was natural that we would cross the best of Amsterdam with the best of Northern California.”

Auto Pineapple Kush Cake / Courtesy of Humboldt Seed Company

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