Imagine being a cannabis grower in a difficult state like Utah. Imagine losing an entire crop due to bad weather, pests, or anything else that suits your fancy. Now imagine coming up with a way to produce cannabis without actually growing the plant. It is possible, according to an international company known as BioHarvest Sciences, Inc. (BHSC).
BHSC has become the first organization to produce full-spectrum cannabis biomass in a laboratory setting – without growing actual plants. They pulled off the feat using select cannabis cells and a bio farming platform developed in-house. The platform produces a pure, clean, and safe biomass while using a fraction of the resources necessary to run a traditional growing operation.
Addressing Product Contamination
Beehive Farmacy is a medical cannabis pharmacy in Utah. They have locations in both Salt Lake City and Brigham City. According to company officials, one of the biggest worries in their industry is product contamination. They have to always be vigilant about who they source their medical cannabis products from. Likewise, they must pay attention to who their suppliers source their biomass from.
Contamination is unacceptable in anything related to pharmaceuticals. Contaminated or impure medications are likely to be less effective. In some cases, they could even be dangerous. BHSC gets it. Fortunately, their bio farming methods eliminate contamination concerns for the most part.
Growing cannabis biomass in a lab allows the company to tightly control everything about the growing environment. There are very few worries about pests, thus mitigating the need to use harmful pesticides. Likewise, they also have no worries about soil contamination, water contamination, etc.
Addressing Product Variability
Another important focus for BHSC is product variability. As things currently stand, a patient could visit Beehive Farmacy multiple times over several months. It would not be unusual for that patient to experience variability between different batches of the exact same product. Why? Because natural growing methods actually encourage variability to some degree.
In a laboratory setting, almost all variability can be eliminated. This leads to more consistent cannabis biomass with known quantities of the desired cannabinoids and terpenes. Likewise, the biomass is cleaner because it has not been exposed to random environmental factors.
Addressing Agricultural Efficiency
From a business standpoint, agricultural inefficiency is pretty big to the medical cannabis industry. A traditional outdoor farm requires a tremendous amount of land to produce significant amounts of biomass. Indoor growing operations require less land, but growers have to expend significant resources to maximize the indoor environment. All of this adds up to more expensive biomass at harvest.
BHSC has significantly reduced agricultural inefficiency by dispensing with the need to grow plants. Cultivating cannabis cells on specially designed bio frames increase the cell concentration while maintaining a significantly smaller footprint. The company claims that a single, seven-foot processing unit in their lab can produce the equivalent of what requires some 240,000 square meters of land in a traditional growing environment.
Cannabis Mass Production
If none of this means anything to you, step back and think about the concept of mass production. Henry Ford revolutionized auto manufacturing when he perfected the assembly-line principle. Likewise, food production in this country was revolutionized when traditional farming was taken into the factory. We now have the capability of mass-producing food in ways our ancestors never dreamed of.
We could be on the cusp of cannabis mass production that would make even the largest traditional farm look silly by comparison. When its day finally arrives, lab-produced cannabis will be the cleanest, purest, and most consistent cannabis on the market. It is actually right around the corner.
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