“Good plants start with good seeds”

Just look at any protected cropping facility that is not cannabis. Unless there's some special thing going on, you'll never see any area for cloning or mother plants. Most of the vegetables industry grows from seed because of its many pros, including not sacrificing any canopy space for growing plantlets. With increasing knowledge and tech from trad horti making its way into cannabis, it's only a matter of time for seeds to become the main starting material across the board. F1 hybrids holds the promise of bringing that level of consistency that is crucial in cannabis. "Our focus is on the plant itself," says Dr. Sharon Ayal, plant geneticist at RCK. "But good plants start with good seeds."

Sharon, who joined RCK over half a year ago after two decades in plant genetics and genomics, from peppers and tomatoes to biotech, leads the company's breeding division. Leading the F1breeding program in the team, Eran Carmel, who came to cannabis breeding after years developing tomato hybrids for Hazera Seeds, says the transition to cannabis felt both natural and overdue.

"In vegetables, everyone starts with seeds," he says. "You save on manpower, avoid the disease risk of mother plants, and make transport much easier. In cannabis, that logic hasn't caught up yet, but it will."

© RCK

From tomatoes to cannabis
Eran points out that most medical cannabis cultivation still relies on cuttings. "That means 10 to 20 percent of your facility is dedicated to maintaining mothers," he explains. "If you start from seed, you can use that space for canopy instead. You also start clean, which is hard to guarantee with cuttings."

Then there's the issue of genetic drift. "When you grow a strain from cuttings over and over for years, the genome might shift. You end up with something slightly different from what you started with," says Eran. "With seeds, you can avoid most of that."

The myth of 'good looking' seeds © RCK
While the most desirable traits are certainly disease resistance for the plant, would it be possible to predict certain aspects by just the looks of the seed in question? In other words, can certain visual traits correlate with plant performance? Both Eran and Sharon are very cautious about this argument. "People often prefer darker seeds, or ones with stripes," Eran says. "There's a commercial side to that, people think darker seeds are healthier, but it's not scientifically grounded."

In cannabis, unlike other crops such as legumes or lentils, there's no research linking seed appearance to key traits. "In tomatoes, for instance, some traits of the seed coat might relate to fruit characteristics," says Sharon. "But in cannabis, we don't have that data. We're not sure any correlation exists."

Building F1 hybrids
Uniformity is at the center of RCK's breeding philosophy. "We're creating true F1 hybrids," Eran says. "Two stable parent lines producing a uniform offspring. That's standard in other crops, but in cannabis it's still new. Only a handful of companies are doing it properly."

For growers used to the predictability of cuttings, that's the bar RCK wants to meet. "The goal is that a grower shouldn't feel they're compromising when they switch from clones to seeds," he says. "Uniformity, resistance, flower size, cannabinoid content, everything should match or exceed what they're used to."

© RCK

Testing, expanding, and scaling
While RCK is based in Israel, the company has already tested its varieties abroad. "We just came back from trials in the Netherlands," says Eran. "The plants performed beautifully there, which gives us confidence as we scale production."

The next year, he adds, will see RCK's first commercial seed batches entering the market. "We're still learning," says Sharon. "We see seeds are stronger than cuttings, but this is the beginning of a longer research process."

Eran agrees. "We've taken a lot from the vegetable world and adapted it to cannabis. The direction is clear, from cuttings to seeds. The challenge now is to make that shift practical, reliable, and worth it for growers."