Today is 420, so we ask for but a small portion of your time spent dabbinโ your doobies to bring you some coffee news. But SURPRISE! Itโs really cannabis and coffee news. A coffee company that is using cannabis tech to grow coffee plants in Southern California.
According to Wired, Boulder, Colorado’s Front Range Biosciencesโa producer of โmarijuana plants free of viruses and bacteriaโโis expanding their crop diversity to include coffee plants and have agreed to give 3 million plants over the next four years to Frinj Coffee. Much like coffee trees, cannabis plants are susceptible to bacteria and diseases that drastically affect their output. To combat this, Front Range Biosciences has created a โclean stockโ system of cloning plants that uses tissue grafts to ensure that just the plants themselves get duplicated, not any of the nasty diseases they may carry.
And Front Range is now using the same process for cloning coffee plants. These lab-cloned plants provide a secondary benefit of allowing Frinj to know exactly what coffee variety they are growing. According to the article wind-pollinated coffee trees often lead to wild hybridization, making it difficult to know the exact genetic makeup of each new plant. But because everything is controlled in the lab, spontaneous hybrids arenโt an issue.
Front Range will also keep a tissue repository of the different coffee varietiesโincluding Geisha, what Frinj is growing. Because a farm full of cloned single variety plant lack genetic diversityโan important factor in keeping entire crops from being wiped out by diseaseโhaving this stockpile they can easily replicate is crucial.
Front Range Biosciences has plans to do the same cloning for bananas, sugar, and hops some time in the future. But right now theyโre bread and butter are coffee and cannabis. Which begs the question, can these cannabinerds hybridize coffee and cannabis to create a THC-rich coffee cherry? It would be really nice to stop having to put all that butter in my coffee.
Zac Cadwaladerย is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.ย Read more Zac Cadwaladerย on Sprudge.
*top image via Front Range Biosciences