The Royale Botanicals Clones Podcast

December 29, 2020
arborvita8
Farmer

Arbor Vita8 · The AV8 Podcast Episode 6: Royal Botanicals Clones

Let’s Talk Clones, and Hemp

The hemp industry is all about genetics. Without good genetics, your crop won’t perform well when it gets to that end extraction you’re trying to sell.

Thinking about genetics before purchasing any hemp to grow is absolutely necessary. You need to align the strain of hemp with your own conditions – the weather, humidity, soil, whether you’re planting inside or out, and more. Narrowing down the conditions you’ll grow in allows you to shop for genetics that will give you the highest rate of success as a hemp farmer.

After establishing an ideal profile for your hemp plants, the next thing to decide is whether to purchase seeds or already growing plants to start your crop. If you lean toward existing plants, the next question is whether to purchase seedlings or use clones.

Seeds, seedlings, or clones

Most people think that, as a new hemp farmer, the question is whether to buy seeds or seedlings, but it’s so much more than that. You also have the option to purchase genetically consistent clones, at scale, for as low as $0.99 per plant!

Here’s the breakdown.

Seeds

Seeds are exactly that, the un-grown plant. Within a given hemp seed cultivar there are multiple phenotypes which possess different traits. Some of the seeds may be high performers in terms of CBD content, while others are not. Some of the seeds may have great growth habits, while others do not. Some seeds may stay extremely total THC compliant at maturity, while others go hot early in their life cycle. Additionally, when growing hemp, a grower wants to have 100% female plants because the females produce cannabinoids, while the males produce only seeds.

Seed companies sell “feminized seeds” which help lessen the risk of a male plant getting into your crop which can essentially ruin the entire field as one male pollinates other females forcing them to produce seeds too. The problem is, there’s no guarantee all your seeds will grow into a female plant. There’s also no guarantee you’ll catch all the males before they stimulate your ladies to make seeds instead of flowers. This reduces the amount of extract you’re able to get from your crop as well as decreases the volume of your biomass. You have to remove all the seeds that get in there before your biomass is ready for processing.

Seedlings

Seedlings are plants grown from those feminized seeds, but instead of having to get the plant started, someone else does it for you. You buy the plant already growing, but you’re still working with the variables possible when growing plants each have their own genetic makeup. All the seeds could have come from the same parents, but just like with any set of siblings, the combination of traits varies.

Generally, growers who choose seeds end up with a crop where a portion is overrippened lessening the cannabinoid content, a portion is at an optimal stage to harvest, and another portion is immature meaning they yield significantly less in both cannabinoids and volume. This is due to the genetic variation within hemp seed stock. They don’t start to flower or mature at the same rate. You can’t do a partial harvest, so that means bringing in your entire crop even though some plants will deliver their optimal yield, while others won’t. This can greatly impact your overall yields in terms of cannabinoids and weight.

Clones

Visually, clones look like seedlings in that they’re young fully-rooted plants, but their genetic makeup is very different. Clones don’t start from seeds. Instead, they’re made from a cutting of their parent plant. In simpler terms, they’ve only got a mom. Not only that, but they’ll have the exact genetic makeup of their mom.

When cloning, you’re making replicas of an existing plant. This reduces the risk of any unusual behavior coming from your crop. At Royale Botanicals they perform 2 years of R&D and phenotype selection before choosing “mother stock” for each cultivar of clones they produce. This enables them to produce genetically identical high-performers. Having a field full of Royale Botanicals clones is comparable to having a basketball team where every player is a clone of Michael Jordan.

The advantages of clones

Before even getting into the advantages of growing clones, it’s necessary to point out one disadvantage of growing seeds — plant loss. There’s not a lot of discussion of the ways you can lose a hemp plant aside from it getting hot, when THC levels get too high, or by being a male. The other issue is in who likes to snack on hemp.

The other major benefit to clones is in their performance as a hemp plant. Because they’re a copy of another plant, you already know exactly how each clone will behave. You’ll get consistency within your crop, during the entire lifecycle of the plant, that’s impossible to achieve any other way. That includes the time each plant takes to grow, the percentage of CBD within each plant, and the overall quality of each bud.

Superior clone creation

Superior clones start with the best genetics, and nobody understands that better than Royale Botanicals. Based out of Colorado, and specializing in crafting hemp clones since 2017, they planted five million clones in 2020 within their 10-acre greenhouse compound.

Creating the perfect clone required a two-year process honing the right set of genetics. It began with looking at how well the clone rooted after cut from its parent plant. Next, they studied overall growth and development. How the plant’s bud looked, what the resin contact was, and the flower’s appearance all helped narrow down options before a final review of the yield in overall poundage and in cannabinoid content.

Each “round” of review narrowed down the pool of applicable hemp plants to create clones. When the process was over, Royale Botanicals had a superior plant they could replicate, supporting the growth of good genetics throughout the hemp industry.

The cost of superiority

It’s a hard conversation, discussing cost when looking at how to begin your hemp crop, but the best advice is to look at the big picture. Paying a little more upfront, only to make more in the end is worth it, if you can count on the quality of your plants the whole way through.

This is how it works for clones. Yes, they cost more than seeds, but seeds often have a lower yield and present the potential for more problems during growing. The real profit in hemp is what happens at the end, when you’re able to sell your extracts at a high price because of the quality. Clones not only help with that, but often guarantee a higher yield as well.

The right experience buying clones

Of even more value, when buying clones, is who you decide to buy from. At Royale Botanicals, the goal is to build lasting partnerships with farmers because of the quality of the plant they provide. You can find information on their cultivars online. This term refers to any plant produced through selective breeding, the essence of creating quality clones.

While you can see the available options, you don’t have to decide which option is best on your own. The experienced team at Royale Botanicals works with the specific elements in your area to suggest the best option. This means reviewing your region’s planting and harvesting dates, as well as the amount of light and humidity your region gets. Of particular interest is the length of each day, since hemp plants need a specific cycle of light and dark to know it’s time to get growing.

After all of these factors get taken into consideration, you’re paired with the optimal cultivar for your crop.

Why we’re talking about Royale Botanicals

At Arbor Vita8, we take quality very seriously. You’ll see it in everything we do, from how we transport baled hemp to the equipment we use to process it. Our goal is to deliver a superior product that nets our farmers and manufacturers the greatest profits. This all starts with genetics, and Royale Botanicals agrees. Having them as one of our partners allows us to support our farmers from the moment they decide to grow hemp. We’re excited to work together and have the ability to deliver superior services right from the start.

Podcast Transcript

Jason Sirotin:
Hello and welcome to the Arbor Vita8 podcast. I’m Jason Sirotin, and today I am here with Aaron Van Wingerden.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Wingerden.

Jason Sirotin:
Wingerden.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
There you go. Wingerden.

Jason Sirotin:
You should hear how people butcher my name, Sirotin, Siratin, it’s a mess. So, Aaron Van Wingerden is the CEO of Royale Botanicals and we just entered into a relationship with Royale Botanicals and we are so excited about it and Aaron’s company specializes in clones. And today we’re going to take a really deep dive into clones versus seeds, we’re going to talk about seedlings and starting. We’re going to talk about clones being more expensive and why. We’re going to talk about the difference between clone and seeds and harvest times and the economic benefit from using clones.

Jason Sirotin:
But before we do that, Aaron, I want to give the audience a second to get to know about you and Royale Botanicals. So, can you kind of take me through what Royale Botanicals is, how you explain it to people, and like how you guys started?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Sure, Jason. Nice to be on the show. Nice to talk to your audience. As mentioned, my name is Aaron Van Wingerden and our company Royale Botanicals produces clones out of the state of Colorado. We got our start in hemp by way of marijuana. I actually ran a cultivation facility for recreational marijuana in the state of Colorado that we built in 2014.

Jason Sirotin:
That’s awesome.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yeah, thanks. We ran that for about three years and then I sold my shares in that business to my partners and shifted our focus over towards young hemp starts in 2017. That hemp was just getting going nationally. It had been in Colorado for a couple of years and there was some interest in some farms here that we were working with for us to provide them with high quality clones. Our background in our facilities here in Colorado, we have a 10-acre greenhouse compound and we provide flowers and bedding plants and potted plant material to a bunch of different retailers here in the state of Colorado.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, for us rooting clones or cuttings, as we like to call them in the horticultural industry, was no different for us than like rooting a geranium or a petunia. So, adding hemp was just a diversification of that with what we could offer. We very quickly realized that there wasn’t a lot of good clone producers in Colorado that were providing high-quality material to farms at scale and in the time that they needed them. So 2017, we grew 50,000 clones, last year, we grew 2 million clones, and this year we did 5 million.

Jason Sirotin:
Wow.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, we ramped up very, very, very, very quickly to service the hemp market’s needs.

Jason Sirotin:
Can I ask a question about that? Just to put it in scale…

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Sure.

Jason Sirotin:
… so people can understand it. In terms of greenhouse square footage, can you take us through, like what was it at the beginning to what it is now?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Sure. The beginning, I think we dedicated probably 5,000 square feet of space toward clone growing and this past year, we dedicated 300,000 square footed space.

Jason Sirotin:
Wow, holy cow. What a cool operation. Why hemp? You’re in a state where it’s legal and you decide, where marijuana is legal and you decide, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to go down this path of hemp?”

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, the hemp, very similar to marijuana, obviously, both come from cannabis plant gene and both marijuana and hemp do not have a whole lot of good genetics that are grown in the business or industry. Marijuana struggles with issues if you’re not growing in a perfectly enclosed environment with their genetics because a lot of the genetics of marijuana were bred for indoor grows, so as soon as you take it out of an indoor grow and into a greenhouse environment or some outdoor marijuana grows, you realize many, many, many problems that you didn’t foresee due to indoor growing breeding, if you will.

Jason Sirotin:
But what-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
And kind of-

Jason Sirotin:
What could some of those problems be? Like what would be a sign of that?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, if you imagine the only variable you’re giving in an indoor grow is when personnel are going in and out of there. You can control the light, the temperature, the heat, the exact timing of everything. For a lot of these indoor grows that are highly automated, there’s very little variables, so you pick a particular variety that does perfect at 68 degrees all the time, you can set your temperature at that in an indoor grow. When you move into a greenhouse or an outdoor grow, yes, you’re harnessing the sun’s energy, so it’s cheaper to grow, but you’re at the mercy of cloudy days or temperature swings.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
In a greenhouse we have, we can control the environment to a degree, but not within a half a degree like you could an indoor grow. So you can have four-or five-, seven-degree swings in a greenhouse and if there’s a genetic marker in that plant that can handle those kinds of swings, adverse growing happens and you get plant disease and pest issues and rooting issues and performance issues. And so for us, that was key to us to start a breeding program in-house right away for hemp because obviously, we’re not growing hemp indoors, we’re not growing hemp very literally in the greenhouse world, so most of all this is for outdoor growing.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So outdoor, you have 30-, 40-degree swings here in Colorado in the middle of summer. It could be 95 degrees in the middle of the day in July and 50 at night. We could have 30-, 40-mile an hour winds for five straight hours. You have the intense sunlight beating down on these plants. So, there’s a lot of variabilities and in order to have a good strong plant in the field perform well for the farmers, it was important for us to put an in-house breeding program in place to try and pick the characteristics of the plant that matter most for field growing.

Jason Sirotin:
Gotcha. Okay, so well, you’ve got this giant field of hemp, right? And you’re trying to grow the best plant, how are you going about that? What is your R&D like to get to what you guys think is the best?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, for our R&D for greenhouse breeding, it takes about two full years to come to fruition to where we’re saying, “Yes, this is the good offering that we want to bring to the farm.” So, the first marker or culling effect that you would put in place is how well do these plants root from a cutting until they’re a finished plant? And we eliminate the weaker ones in that first round and the second round of culling would come from how did the plant grow and develop? Is it upright shrunk? Shaped like a V? Does it spread and sprawl on the ground? Does it grow really rapidly in its vegetative state? And then finally in the flower state, how are the bud structure? How’s the flower look? What’s the resin content?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Then when we take that into effect, that’s our next cull that happened inside the greenhouse, that growing. We say, “Okay, now, let’s take these winners from these first two rounds of culling and put it out in real life scenarios.” So, we have a one acre R&D field here on our property that we plant with drip tape and we plant the hemp winners, if you will, outside in the elements in the summertime, usually we plant June 1st and we monitor weekly how these plants perform outside in the field. And then you can really see if this genetic plants or this particular cultivar performs well in real life environments for these farmers. And then you can determine, “Okay, these are the winners that we’re going to select and give to the farms for the next year’s offerings.”

Aaron Van Wingerden:
And that has to do with how sturdy the plant stayed, did it stay upright in the wind and the issues that we have here in Colorado? What was the resin content? How big were the buds? And what was your biomass yield at the end of it all per plant? So, all of those factors come into play for us to determine what we call a winner that we want to offer it for from our genetic portfolio to farms next year.

Jason Sirotin:
Yeah. And when you’re looking at the yield, you’re not just looking at the amount of poundage, you’re looking at the cannabinoid content. Correct?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Correct. Correct.

Jason Sirotin:
Are you guys doing-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, what’s-

Jason Sirotin:
Sorry. Go ahead, Aaron.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
It’s okay, so during the flowering cycle of the plant starting about week five into their flower cycle, you can really see formed bud material that you can then harvest and do testing on. So weekly, we’re taking tests from about week five into the flower cycle all the way through harvest, so we can see what the graph tracking is for CBD content and THC content, because obviously, that’s very key important. You don’t want to have a plant that spikes past the legal limit of 0.3 THC very early in its firing cycle, so it’s important for us to track both of those lines, those graphical lines and see which ones pan out to be the best.

Jason Sirotin:
But it’s also true that no matter what, your plants can spike, right? Even if you have these genetics that have been tested…

Aaron Van Wingerden:
That’s correct.

Jason Sirotin:
… if you’re not watching them. Why does that happen? How does it happen? Is there things that people can do to avoid that? Because I know, we’ve gotten a lot of calls with people who’ve had that problem this year and I’d love for them to be able to repair that in 2021.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yep, so there is a lot of what I call pot lore out there where people say you can manipulate the THC by different temperatures, different fertilizers, different way of planting or cultivating and that’s just not true. The enzymes that the plants put out that create either CBD or THC are in the plant’s DNA, so it’s part of the genetics, you can’t change it just by manipulating the temperature or the environment or what you’re feeding the plant. So, that is the number one that we need to debunk.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Number two is because hemp is from the cannabis family, it’s always got to have THC in there, so it is true. All CBD bread material does have a THC in them and eventually, it will spike past the 0.3% range in its flowering life cycle. So, if you have a variety that goes above the threshold five or six weeks into its flowering state, it’s not at full maturity, so when you harvest to try and stay compliant, you have to harvest early, then your yields go down and your resin content goes down and your CBD percentage goes down. So for us, it’s important to try and find that sweet spot of about seven to eight, maybe even nine weeks into the flowering cycle of the plant because that’s when the buds are the biggest, the most mature and you can get the most resin content out of your plants.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
But it’s important to remember you need to time out your harvest based on the information that we can provide you here at Royale Botanicals to say, “All right, whether you’re in Michigan or you’re in Tennessee, or you’re down to Florida, and you plant this particular cultivar, here’s when you can expect it to go hot, so plan your harvest to be a week or two earlier.” And not all cultivars work in different regions, so it’s just a matter of where you’re at and what we’re trying to do for you.

Jason Sirotin:
And that’s what I think people forget, that people who were getting into the space or have not had a good experience with a good clone partner or a good processing partner is that companies like ours are rooted in our client success. We want you to win. We want farmers to be profitable. We want people to have really great years and we’re dedicated to helping you be successful. Aaron, can you tell me about like what it’s like as somebody who’s buying clones for you what the experience is like and what they can expect when working with Royale Botanicals?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Sure. They can expect just like you hit on, we want our farms to be successful. The last thing we want is to have a one-and-done customer base. We want to build a portfolio of healthy farms, healthy customers that repeat buy from us year after year after year. And so, if someone is a new customer and who comes to us, the first thing we do for them is figure out what their harvest plan date is and what their plan planting date is based on their region and figure out a cultivar that works well for that particular growing region.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, that comes into light and humidity here are our top two things that we want to focus in on. And so, then we’ll walk the customer through why one particular cultivar is better than another for their particular growing region. So, hemp is, what we call in horticulture terms, an obligate short-day plant, so that means it needs to have more hours of darkness or X number of hours of nights in order to trigger its flowering cycle. So for instance, if a cultivar or has a flower trigger at 14 hours of day length, what that means is when the days go shorter than 14 hours, it will stop growing its vegetative state and it will trigger its flowering cycle.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So for instance, one cultivar that works well in Michigan will not work well in Texas, because Michigan, it has 14-, 15-hour day lengths in the summer, so that plants, that that particular cultivar that has that timing or the trigger will grow vegetative and big, grow big and strong, and have enough yield before it turns into its flowering state. Whereas alternatively, if we plant that same cultivar in Texas, they never get to 14 hours of day length, at least down in like Austin area, for instance. So, as soon as you plant that small plant, it’s already triggering its flowering cycle, so you’ll end up with a six-inch plant with buds on them.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Now, if we reverse that and say, “All right, let’s get a 12-hour cycle trigger,” that’s perfect for Texas, but if you put a 12-hour trigger plant in Michigan, it will become an 8-ft. tree before the daylight is short enough to trigger the flower cycle and you’ll have a snowstorm there before all those buds develop. So, it’s very, very important to know the day lengths in the summertime during the planting season for hemp and we at Royale Botanicals can help do that with you to ensure your success.

Jason Sirotin:
And I’ll tell you what, in this business, you need partners. This is like I think when the people who are going to be successful are the people who team up and have the strategic partnerships to get the job done because there are no big boys in this space that are laying out a logistics plan and getting everything in place. We have to work together to do that now, so that we can win and really be the true pioneer.

Jason Sirotin:
So, I think what you’re doing is so critical and we’re telling all of our farmers, “Hey, you got to talk to Royale Botanicals, you have to get the right cultivar for you.” And I think that’s an important thing that people can walk away from this podcast with is that you need what’s right for you and it is not just what you read on the internet, you need to talk to a professional, a hemp expert. And I know our team at Arbor Vita8 and the team at Royale Botanicals are there to help you and it’s critical to the success of the business.

Jason Sirotin:
I wanted to chat real quick about clones versus seeds. Like I’ve heard all over, so I’ve got guys who’ll say, “Seeds are the best. Only grow with seeds as you’re getting the most real thing.” And then, “No, clones if you want the most genetic perfection.” This is an interesting debate that’s probably going to get a lot of comments.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yes, definitely. So, I am a believer that clones are far superior to seeds for many, many reasons. First and foremost, any seed that you get that’s feminized, because you have to have… let me back up. Hemp is what we call dioecious species, so it has male plants and female plants. We’re all aware that the female plants are the ones that produce the buds with the colas and the resin that produces the CBD content that’s of value and male plants have absolutely no value.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, in order to get feminized seeds, you have to take a female plant, trick it with chemistry and actually hermaphrodite that particular plant. So, you’re injecting, if you will, the hermaphroditic gene into that plant. It then puts off male parts on its female flowers and in theory, it is all female pollen. So, you take that female pollen then you apply it to another female plant that you’re just growing on as its own. It accepts that female pollen and creates seed pockets instead of resin. You harvest that seed and the thought is okay all of this seed should be female because you’re applying female pollen to a female plant.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Well, as they coined in Jurassic Park, nature always finds a way. When you’re tricking nature and you have this hermaphroditic gene that you’re inserting into the plant to begin with, a portion of those seeds will have that hermaphroditic trait, so if you take 100,000 seeds and you go plant them in your fields if only 1% of them end up being a hermaphroditic plant, that’s still a massive amount of plants that you have the potential of having pollen. One hermaphroditic plant could pollinate several acres around it. So, if you plant 100,000 plants in your acreage, you have the potential of having 1,000 of these spread throughout your whole farm.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
That pollen will then spread and pollinate all the female plants around it and when a female plant is producing seed sex it, it reduces the amount of resin it’s putting off. So, you’re reducing the amount of CBD percentage of the plant puts off and the amount of poundage that the plant puts off of extractable material. Furthermore, most extractors, if you have any seed in your biomass, they’re going to require it to be separated, so seed weight gets pulled out of your biomass. So, when you think you have, “I got 1,000 pounds here that I’m going to get to an extractor,” by the time you pull out the seed weight, it’s probably down to 600 or 700 pounds of actual biomass to be extracted, because you have to get rid of all that seed weight.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, that’s the first and foremost reason why clones are superior. The second one is clones are genetically the same, so what you do is you take the mother stock plant that we have bred, pheno hunted and selected, and you’re taking that plant and you’re taking cuttings off of the mother stock plant, and reproducing that plant as a clone. That’s where the word came from. So, you’re genetically identical plants from the mother stock that you’re pulling off of, so what you can expect in your field is the exact same plant all the way through. The same growth pattern, the same timing on flowering cycle, and the same harvest period for your entire field.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
The problem with feminized seedlings is you have multiple phenotypes across the same cultivar, so think of it like siblings from the same parents. Unless they’re twins, one child has green eyes, the other child has brown eyes, one child grows to be 6’3″, the other is 5’11”. Same goes with seedlings. Feminized seedlings in the same genetic makeup have multiple phenotypes, so the plants will grow differently and have different flowering cycle. So, we mentioned the flowering trigger early on in this podcast, some phenotypes within the same genetic strain of a seed will trigger at 14 hours daylight, others won’t trigger until 13 hours and a half, while still others within the same family won’t trigger until 13 hours.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
And the reason that’s important is when it comes time to harvest your field, only one-third of it is going to be ready, let’s say, to harvest by October 1st. Whereas the other third, because they triggered two weeks later than the first third of the field with the different phenotype that won’t be ready until the middle of October and then the final third of the field won’t be ready to harvest until November. Well, farms can’t go in there and selectively harvest one third of their field, they got to harvest the whole thing at once.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Well, the less mature plants will have lower CBD percent content and lower yields, so while that one bud that you plucked and sent off for a test, it comes back, “Hey, 10% CBD, we’re good to go.” That’s only one-third of your fields with that particular phenotype where the rest of your fields needed more time to mature. So, when you amalgamate your entire field when you harvest, your biomass and CBD percentage comes way down much lower than what you originally thought. Whereas clones because clones are all genetically identical when you go to harvest that whole field, what’s on plant 1 and plant 21 and plant 101, it’s going to be exactly the same.

Jason Sirotin:
Man, that is quite an argument is to use clones. I’m just curious and I’m sure you’ve heard it, how would a seed person combat that argument?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Most seeds arguments say, their number one statement that they say is, “Seeds have what they call a taproot, so plants that have a taproot have deeper roots, sucking up more water nutrients, they grow bigger, bolder, badder, better, more biomass.” Well, I come back to that is most hemp farmers aren’t going to sow seed direct into their field. They’re going to buy seedlings from propagators like myself, who sow them in plug trays. Then the plug trays get delivered to the farms and they plant seedlings starts. They don’t direct sow seed in the field. Those that do or have in the past will tell you, mice and rodents love hemp seed, so when you go and sow your field, you run a very, very high risk of half of those seeds being eaten up even before they germinate and put roots in the ground, so it’s a much safer bet to grow the seedling around.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
The problem with seedlings when you plant a seed, yes, it’s true the very first root that the seed puts out has a taproot, but as soon as that root sees oxygen, it air prunes itself and the taproot is no more. So, anyone who gets plug trays of seedlings obviously knows that there’s holes in the bottom of all the plug trays where these propagators are growing on. So, when the first taproot comes out of the bottom of that hole and gets oxygen to it, it will air prune automatically, so seedlings actually never have a taproot.

Jason Sirotin:
And folks that’s science right there. So, man, I mean, I never ever think about seeds the same way again. Thank you for that lesson. That was an incredible amount of knowledge. You can tell that you guys have that on lock. That was awesome.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Thanks. Yeah. No problem.

Jason Sirotin:
I love learning things and you hear it from somebody who knows how to teach it in a way that’s understandable, that’s so critical to the success of what people are doing, so I thank you for that. Let’s talk for a second. The thing that I always think about with clones, this might be a really weird thing to think about, Aaron, but I’m going to tell you, because here’s how somebody else is thinking this, how the hell do you ship acres and acres with the clones? And how do they get transported safely across long distances?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, that’s a great question. So, hemp, as I mentioned, is obligate short-day plant, which means it’s triggered by light or darkness. Okay? So, it has to have a specific allotted time in either light or in darkness to flip one way or the other. So, most people are concerned with shipments of hemp in a truck for long periods of time more than a day or two that you’re all of a sudden going to trigger the plant in transport into its flowering cycle. Well, this just isn’t true, because like I said, a plant needs both in order for it to trigger.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, what we do is when we ship our clones, it’s in a climate controlled semi-truck, so we can adjust the temperature to whatever the customer requires or asks for, we recommend somewhere between 55 and 60 degrees for the transport and when it’s inside a climate-controlled reefer trailer, it’s 100% dark in there during the travel, so the plant basically goes on pause. If there’s no light interruption and it’s 100% dark for 48 straight hours, it doesn’t trigger. The plant needs both to realize wintertime is coming, the days are getting shorter. It has to have a specific number of hours of light or darkness to understand and trigger its own genetic enzymes to go into the flowering stage.

Jason Sirotin:
How long can I be on pause?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, we have ships-

Jason Sirotin:
Sorry, I have to know. How long?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
That’s okay. So, we’ve done tests with hemp plants and we can hold a plant at 40 degrees, that’s as cold as we’d like to get it for two full weeks and we have a cooler here on site. For two full weeks, we pulled it out, put it back into the greenhouse, and within a day, it’s popped right back on and ready to go. So, a half one could have-

Jason Sirotin:
That’s incredible.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
It is. Once it has its roots and it’s a living breathing plant, it’s very, very resilient.

Jason Sirotin:
So, if I’m a-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
And you could do a lot of things to it.

Jason Sirotin:
If I’m a farmer, I’ve got 20 acres and I’m like, “Okay. Load up the clones.” Is that like one semi? Is that two semis? It just seems like it would take up a lot of space and I think that goes into my next conversations. You hear people talk about the cost differences, seeds versus clones. And I just think of that with the shipping and all of that, how does it equal out? And let’s talk about cost and value.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Sure, sure. So, for your first part of your question, you asked about shipping cost, so with us with how we can ship clones, we can ship a minimum of 1,000 clone order as many as 1 million clones. And how we do that is if it’s a small order, we can box up the clones in our custom-made boxes and our clones are grown in a 72-cell Elle tray. So, there are 70 plants in about 1 sq. ft. area. We can fit three of those trays in a box, so we can fit a little over 200 plants in a box that can be palletized and shipped pretty much anywhere in the world.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, if you’re getting 1,000 clone order from us, it will take up five boxes. We don’t like to ship through UPS or USPS because live goods tend to get manhandled a little bit, so we’ll actually dedicate a trailer, a specific trailer, a climate-controlled trailer with our boxes, palletize them and ship them to wherever the customers are at and it usually arrives within 24 to 48 hours. Those are small orders.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
On larger orders, we have what we call a rolling rack system. Those are mobile carts, if you will, that have adjustable shelves and we can fit approximately 1,500 plants on each one of these racks. A semi load can hold 45 of these racks, so we can fit 60,000 to 70,000 plants on one semi load. So, if a farm needs a million plants staggered over a two-week period, we can make that happen by shipping him a truckload a day or two truckloads a day or one truckload a week, whatever works with his planting…

Jason Sirotin:
Right. Gotcha.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
… later in efficiencies.

Jason Sirotin:
And let’s talk about the cost. How much does it cost to buy your clones or I’m sure there’s different prices and then how is the shipping gone into that, and then the difference between seed because we’re looking at that value and already, I mean, you’ve made a really compelling argument. I don’t I would, if I was going to plant a farm, I would never, ever use seeds, but I want to understand the cost implications of that.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Sure. So, our starting price for clones is $1.75, but we quickly reduce our price when it comes to volume orders. Any farm ordering 100,000 plants or more are only got to pay $1 per clone. So, over the last few years, I’m sure many of your fan-base or other customers or hemp producers have paid anywhere in the range of $3 to $7 of clone. Well, with our technology here, we have dedicated ourselves to cutting our costs as much as possible, so we could pass along that savings to farmers. There’s no reason for a farm to be paying $3, $4, $5 a clone, when he can get a high-quality start clone from us for $1 if they’re buying in bulk. And that is going to outperform any seedling on the market.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Most seed material is going to be in the range of 30 to 40 set of seedlings, so if you buy a seedling material. So, if you think about it, you’re only saving your input costs of about 50% more on a clone. However, the figure I’d like to put out there is if you pay $1 per clone or you pay $0.50 per seedling, most of the farms plant 3,000 plants per acre, so at $1 for a clone your input costs are $3,000 whereas the seedlings, it’s only $1,500, so about half. However, what we just discussed with seedlings and their phenotype differentiality, your CBD content has probably got to be one-third of what a clone field will produce. So, our average-

Jason Sirotin:
And yield, too. Like the total yield.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
And yield.

Jason Sirotin:
Right? Because that’s what-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
And the total yield.

Jason Sirotin:
That was the thing in the last conversation. I’m sorry to interrupt you, I just got excited.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
That’s okay.

Jason Sirotin:
You were talking about how much that we would lose a third of the plants, right? And then we were talking about how we get them in the trays, right? That means, if we’re doing seedlings, we might as well do clones, because you’re doing the same job, right?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Right.

Jason Sirotin:
And there’s no taproot?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Right. You still have to plant it. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:33:50].

Jason Sirotin:
And if you put all those in the ground, you think you’re going to get it at the same time and you’re just getting less, like it’s just all making even more sense to me now. I’m just doing the math, like the value is so high. It seems more expensive at first, but just on losing so much weight and cannabinoids, I mean, that’s crazy.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yes, yes. I mean, if you’re looking at it strictly from an input cost perspective, you’re missing the big picture. I would say revenue sales per acre on a clone are easily going to be $5,000 to $7,000 more per acre than if you went seedling, just based on yield and CBD content.

Jason Sirotin:
Wow. Yeah. And it’s that penny wise pound foolish. You don’t want to just be focused on that first number, like if you buy the cheapest of everything, it will suck. Have you ever bought the cheapest blender that breaks in a day? Spend money…

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Exactly.

Jason Sirotin:
… get the right stuff, do it right or don’t do it because there’s so many people who’ve lost so much. It’s got to stop. People have to stop…

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Agree.

Jason Sirotin:
… not doing it right. It’s crazy.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Agree.

Jason Sirotin:
It just gets me, man. I’ve talked to so many people who’ve lost so much. It’s nuts. We’ve talked about CBD a lot and that’s awesome. But there’s so many other cannabinoids. Are you guys doing CBN or CBG? And then I had a question about where do you think the market is going because we’re still in this trial of CBD? How do we get people to start to enjoy the benefits of these other cannabinoids? And I don’t know if you have an opinion on that, Aaron. I just figured I’d throw it out there.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yes. No. Yeah, I appreciate it, so we did run through our R&D the last couple of years, our CBG cultivar. We are bringing two of them to market for 2021. One that works well in the northern latitudes, another one works well in the more southern latitudes based on the day length, so that’s something that we added to our portfolio for 2021 because a lot of people are really into growing CBG because there’s non-detectable THC in most of those strings, because the CBD enzyme hasn’t formed into CBD A and that’s why the CBG enzyme. I’m not a chemist, so I could be getting a lot of this wrong, but-

Jason Sirotin:
Well, CBG does bond to more cannabinoid receptors. It’s really good for the immune system.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Got it.

Jason Sirotin:
So, I mean, people, I mean right now, immune is really hot. Everybody wants a good immune system, so I mean, I think that’s why it’s picking up steam and everybody’s trying to get on that next thing that’s going to make money and if somebody decides…

Aaron Van Wingerden:
That’s right.

Jason Sirotin:
… CBG is awesome, it’s a chance to get some of those prices back up to where they were.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Agreed, agreed. So, yes, we are offering that on the CBG in 2021. For CBN, we have one cultivar that has exhibited traits with higher percentages of CBN, but that will not be ready for the 2021 season. It still has to go through our rigorous testing and R&D process and so, we’re hopeful that that would be a 2022 offering.

Jason Sirotin:
Yeah, and I believe CBN is going to be massive. CBN helps with sleep among other things. And it’s interesting to note, I just learned this recently, sitting with one of my growers that the CBN is a byproduct of THC decaying, which is interesting.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
I did not know that.

Jason Sirotin:
Yeah.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Wow.

Jason Sirotin:
And that’s why if you smoke really dry marijuana, you get more tired, because there’s more CBN in it, so it’s just-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Interesting.

Jason Sirotin:
There’s so much in this plant that is yet to be discovered and it’s just, I just feel so cool to be in so early and to be seeing it all up close. I just feel very-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yeah, I agree.

Jason Sirotin:
I feel so lucky.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
I agree. It’s just tip of the iceberg. It’s an amazing plant. They can do amazing things and I’m very excited for the future of the hemp industry.

Jason Sirotin:
So, what is next for you guys? We’re coming up on the end of the year, it’s been a tough one for a lot of people. We’re coming into 2021, what does the future look like for Royale Botanicals?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, I’m very bullish on the hemp market, actually. I know that 2020 was a difficult one. Prices kind of took a nosedive. COVID hit. Not a lot of farms were planting this year as compared to 2019, but I really feel that as the industry matures and extractors and companies like yourself on the backend are working with companies like my company on the frontend, we can really provide a one-stop shop for farms.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Farms want to farm. They’re really, really good at what they do. They want to cultivate the plants in their land and they want to know that they have a sales channel for the end of it. They don’t want to have to become the chemists. They don’t want to have to become the extractor. They don’t want to become the end formulator, and they also don’t want to be the propagator or the young plant producer. So, if we can close the loop for them and provide them with high quality genetics with quality, good-priced clones and extractors and product formulators on the other end, like your company, is engaged in knowing that the product that these farms grow is got to be consistent, high quality and the same every time, everybody wins.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, the farms can do what they do best. Me, as a young plant producer and breeder, I do what I do best and your company as the final product formulations you guys do to achieve this. I call it everyone stays in their own lane, but we’re all on the same highway going to the same destination.

Jason Sirotin:
Yeah, and there is no reason that we shouldn’t be communicating at the very beginning. If you know that you’re getting your clones from Royale Botanicals and you know you’re doing your processing with Arbor Vita8, we should be working together to guarantee that we are all successful because we all have a lot riding on it.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Agreed.

Jason Sirotin:
We need to be successful with it and the industry has a lot riding on it.

Jason Sirotin:
Aaron, I am so excited about this relationship. It was so great talking to you. I want to do like 50 of these with you because you’re super knowledgeable and I learned a ton and I really, really appreciate you. So, can you tell everybody how they can get in touch with you? Give them the Royale Botanicals website and all that good stuff?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yes, definitely. So, it’s royale-botanicals.com, that’s website. And then you can call our sales manager, Sam Burney at any time as well to talk to a real live person and his number, let me pull it up here.

Jason Sirotin:
While you’re doing that. Have I been saying the name of the company wrong? Is it Royale? And I’ve been saying-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Royale.

Jason Sirotin:
And I’ve been saying Royal.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Royale.

Jason Sirotin:
So, it’s Royale.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Royale, so you add that extra E at the end.

Jason Sirotin:
I’m so sorry, Aaron.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
That’s quite all right. My wife is an integral part of our company and she has the marketing flair and Royale Botanicals is the product of her imagination, so.

Jason Sirotin:
I love it because people always call ours Arbor Vita8, so I just butchered your name. So, Royale Botanicals.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
That’s correct. Royale-botanicals.com is the website and it’s-

Jason Sirotin:
It reminds me of when Howard Stern in the movie where he has to say WNBC and like, Royale.

Aaron Van Wingerden:
Yep, exactly, exactly.

Jason Sirotin:
All right, what’s the phone number?

Aaron Van Wingerden:
So, if anybody wants to talk to a person, yes, Sam Burney is our National Sales Manager. His number is (704) 807-4463.

Jason Sirotin:
Aaron-

Aaron Van Wingerden:
He’d be happy to talk to anybody and answer all the questions that they need.

Jason Sirotin:
Yeah. You guys got to call Aaron and his team. They are just good people and that’s really what it’s about. We got to support great people who do great things. Aaron, thank you so much. On behalf of Arbor Vita8 and the Arbor Vita8 podcast, I’m Jason Sirotin and we will see you next time.

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