|
|
Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 29, 2017 10:21:14 GMT -5
A disclaimer to start. I've never actually used marijuana. Not due to some code or intrinsic moral fibrousness, but due to being a pathetically nerdy square back when I was of the age when someone might have offered me a hit. I got plenty of secondhand smoke in college, but that's about as close as I've come. At this point, the ship has sailed, and I doubt I'll try it absent some medical need. I was just reading this interesting article about how legalization of recreational pot is dramatically transforming the marketplace and prices, and driving small producers out of the marketplace due to lack of competitiveness. The thing that I lament is how the progress of legalization will almost certainly transform the pot economy all across the US. (Being US chauvinist again rowan) One of the coolest things about the illegal pot market has been how innovative and inventive the DIY small scale growers became. There are so many advances in low input, low cost propagation: mist and water propogators etc that have developed directly from these growers. Also the breeding/hybridization work done by those folks boggles the mind. With the price dropping and availability going up, the incentive driving these types of innovations dissappear. A moment of silence for the golden age of DIY weed inventions,  |
|
|
|
Post by steev on Dec 29, 2017 11:43:29 GMT -5
Having both grown and used my share of pot (in the old days, before things got very advanced), I can only regret the impending BigAgification of dope.
|
|
|
|
Post by richardw on Dec 29, 2017 14:30:33 GMT -5
All is still well in the downunder DIY inventions, though advances in breeding/hybridization has so it appears a disadvantage, the stuff is now so strong that it stinks big time, talking with a bloke the other day who was walking his dog by a local river, he said he could smell it growing in the scrub, the old strain 'bushweed'of 30+ years ago never ponged as much.
I think also a moment of silence for the old bushweed
|
|
|
|
Post by walt on Dec 29, 2017 15:45:32 GMT -5
Toomanyirons. It was the inovation Oxbowwfarm was admiring, not the product.
But while on the subject, more or less. Back in 1977, when I was in grad school, someone was schedualled to present a seminar in the Ag Dept. He was late. While we were waiting for the presenter, someone mentioned he had been offered a payment if he used his ag education and experience to improve pot in a certain way. Someone else mentioned something similar. Turned out every one of us had been contacted, not in any organized way, but just someone who knew we were ag students.
I had been offered payment if I doubled chromosomes. Someone else had been offered payment for crossing local ditchweed with the finest Mexican. Etc. No one said whether he had taken it. But it must have been tempting to a bunch of poor grad students and post docs.
|
|
|
|
Post by steev on Dec 29, 2017 20:21:42 GMT -5
Prohibition could have taught us a few things: that when something some people find enjoyable/useful is outlawed, there will be people ready to make a profit; that when the profits are substantial, unscrupulous people will do anything to get a slice of that pie; that many people will make a living enforcing the laws; and that these enforcers will resist decriminalization of that substance, fearing loss of said livelihood (exactly how prohibition of alcohol morphed into prohibition of pot and other drugs).
Personally, I'm in favor of decriminalizing all these drugs, thereby removing the outrageous profits and impetus toward criminal behavior of both pushers and addicts; will some people ruin their lives, and the lives of others, if they have free access to their drug-of-choice? Undoubtedly, but this would differ from the current situation how? Oh, right, the enforcers would have to seek other work, as would the pushers. Hard cheese, that.
|
|
|
|
Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 29, 2017 21:11:27 GMT -5
Personally, I could give a crap about marijuana good/bad, legal/illegal. I'm just saying the DIY clandestine homegrow guys are innovative as hell. They advanced the state of the art in DIY micro-propagation, small scale hydroponics, etc by orders of magnitude. And on a breeding standpoint they tripled or more the potency of the crop in less than 50 years, without any professional breeding programs or directed industry efforts or funding. I'm willing to steal all those ideas, and I'm lamenting that the engine that drove that innovation is sputtering out. I'm sure lots of advances in cannabis cultivation will be made over the coming years, but they'll be made to optimize for larger scale operation and much of the basic research and ideas won't be as immediately scaleable to the kind of stuff that I'm interested in.
|
|
|
|
Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Dec 30, 2017 2:34:43 GMT -5
an interesting point. I guess i hadn't quite thought about how much indoor soil, hydroponic and aeroponic / "fogponic" innovation has come from the DIY pot scene. But your probably right we've probably gotten some great advances from that community. Nice notice and shoutout of the less than 50 years potency increase from untrained amateurs vs Big Ag. Though i don't think all of that innovation will be lost. I'm seeing it show up in other DIY Agriculture areas. forum.openag.media.mit.edu/Most of the people on the OpenAg forum are using indoor hydroponic / aeroponic systems for their indoor growing. Some of them are directly using and citing sources from the Marijuana / pot community information. I am currently experimenting with indoor piezo aeroponics / "fogponics". I also got some airstones to experiment with. farmbot.io/opensourceecology.org/on another note... do pot plants smell so bad because of the THC itself smells bad? Or is it some sort of other oil or compound in the plants? Because yes they smell bad just from people growing the plants, not even smoking them. I'm all in favor of breeding strains that do not smell so terrible or transgenic tomato or other plants with THC to transfer to a new host. Hell, transgenic THC tomatoes or mushrooms or whatever could be marketed as "healthy" natural-ish medicine to those who claim to need it for medical purposes. I'm not against Pot, i'm just against the smell and people smoking it. I'm all for industrializing it into pill form. If that means the little guys get ground into dust i'm fine with that. EDIT: I guess those e-cig things dont smell when people have THC oil, so it must be something else present in the plants. |
|
|
|
Post by steev on Dec 30, 2017 2:47:08 GMT -5
Chacun a son gout; I love the smell of dope, even though I've little use for it.
|
|
|
|
Post by richardw on Dec 30, 2017 3:00:05 GMT -5
I'm more a fan of cigar smell myself, nothing nicer than catching a brief whiff.
|
|
|
|
Post by billw on Dec 30, 2017 13:06:50 GMT -5
Government distorts anything that it gets involved in. For crop plants, laws that affect their cultivation become evolutionary imperatives. So, legalization is a major change in conditions that will alter the evolutionary course of the plant, just as criminalization did. There will probably be a mass extiction among cultivars, many of which will simply get homogenized out of the wider marketplace. The continued requirement for indoor growing will probably also continue to turn this plant into one that cannot take care of itself very well. You could not design a system better to create evolutionary bottlenecks than to limit growing as my state (Washington) has done. No growing by individuals, just a few licensed businesses. If you wanted to do garden-scale breeding with this plant, you're out of luck, legally at least. Hopefully that will change in time.
|
|
