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I'm your host Matthew, and I'll occasionally be joined by my homie Notso dog, breeder and grower from Mendocino, to speak on these subjects and sometimes interview other participants. Our goal is to document this history before it's written by corporations and others who just weren't there. Let's start writing some wrongs. Welcome to the underground. Welcome everyone. I'm Matthew. This is Brendan from Zomia Collective. This is the Breeders Syndicate, and today we're going to be talking about land races, what's been going on in Thailand, the current political climate, and kind of what Zomia Collective's all about. First off, like I said, this is Brendan from Zomia Collective. It's a very special group out in Thailand, and I've been speaking with them lately about what's going on out there and just been totally blown away. Fascinated, interested. It's very rare in our community where I run into someone where I feel like their passion is at the true fervor level that mine is, or a lot of my friends are, where it's just like, this is what we live to do. And I feel like Brendan is one of those. So welcome, Brendan. It's nice to meet you, man. Yeah, no, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, honestly. So when you're talking about passion, that's what it's all about. That's what we live for here. Yeah, I can tell. And from the type of political activities you've gotten yourself into and the works you do for social change, it's very, very humbling to watch from a person way over here. It's what I'd love to be doing. So mad props. Tell me a little bit about Zomia. Tell me what Zomia is in the first place. Well, Zomia is a collective. It's a project that's working on long-term land-raised conservation in Southeast Asia. But fundamentally, it's much more than that. It's a social movement. It's a concept in political philosophy and anthropology that's sort of grounded in an understanding of the indigenous people of the hill tracks of Southeast Asia. It's sort of non-jurisdictional entity, which comprises about 100 million people speaking so many different languages, all of whom are united in a sort of a refusal to partake in the state, in paying taxes and being conscripted, and instead live in the hills away from everybody else. One of the things that unites the region is the choice of crops, namely cannabis. So with a foundation in political activism, which we can get into if you want, a sort of nucleus of cannabis breeders, growers, village elders, and tribal communities formed into a collective with this purpose of preservation, the land-raised cannabis in Southeast Asia. That's even beyond. That's amazing. Can you tell me what kind of pushed you in this direction? Where did you grow up? What got you into the Southeast Asia climate? Stuff like that. Sure. Personally, I'm Basque from the Basque country, but I grew up in Scotland, and that was kind of, me and Matthew were talking kind of a little bit, the sort of train spotting style of things. We were buying cannabis from pretty sketchy places from a pretty young age. And I mean, for those who know, you know what the scene's all about. And when you catch that bug, especially for us, we were really lucky to get stuff like gold stamps from the Tsar, gold seal, like black Afghans. Despite being in a really northern remote location, we did benefit from some of the sort of the small-scale smugglers before the war on terror and the changes in the airports, you know, sort of killed that. And from then, it was, you know, at 16, I came out to India and then to Southeast Asia and ended up never, never leaving. You know, a lot of my formative experiences were there. I fell into the wine industry, strangely enough, as a sort of francophone in Southeast Asia. But, you know, there's this kind of, I guess this racism, I suppose, where the, or internalized racism, I don't know what's how you want to describe it, but there's the need for like a token French guy to sell wine in the fancy restaurants. And it doesn't matter whether he's Basque or actually French or not, close enough, you know. And so, as a lover of, you know, good taste and tiroir and everything else, I always had a bit of chip on my shoulder about good food, sort of being so expensive. And, you know, this was my way to be able to taste what I wanted to taste and to talk with chefs and that kind of stuff. And it was great, but I also, it was great, but it was also terrible. And I got very disillusioned. And so, when the opportunity to sort of bring the structure of sommelier, in particular, to the cannabis world came about, I jumped on it because it was, you know, the culmination and honestly, a 16-year-old me wouldn't have believed it, you know, it's just a dream country, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so, basically, lucky enough to be working in restaurants with a budget high enough to pay for traveling in terms of R&D. And pre-COVID, a lot of traveling, you know, looking for indigenous or traditional fermented beverages for food pairings, led me and my team to be in contact with a lot of communities who were also growing cannabis. And in the course of, you know, spending time in these communities learning how they ferment different grains, cereals, pulses, et cetera, into alcohol and drinks, the opportunity came about to sort of learn more about the land-raised cannabis. And it was very nicely timed a few years before the legalization in Thailand, which gave a little bit more confidence to us and to others to be able to sort of open up, because as I'm sure a lot of you are aware, the penalties for, you know, engaging in anything cannabis related in Thailand before legalization were very, very severe. Yeah. And so it was, yeah, it was really about, it was about timing and about passion, I guess, about a lot of like-minded individuals with, you know, a singular target, I guess. And that target, again, being the conservation of land-raises. And I think it's a subject which is pretty easy to be passionate about, you know, there's a substance, there's stories, there's so much to it. Yeah, there's a lot to it. When you were talking about, like, going into the communities and looking up fermented, different fermented drinks, that's fascinating. Like, can you give us an example? Like, bang, is that, like, do they make fermented bang and stuff like that? Well, I've actually never seen fermented bang. It's definitely not out of the bounds of the imagination. No, you know, we were looking at doing, in this particular context, sort of pre-colonial Indian Thai recipes and wondering at our intellectual dishonesty at charging really high prices for French wine pairings with that. Yeah, yeah, of course. And so it was a matter of, yeah, trying to find, you know, different sort of unique things, which we could bring that value element to the customer, to the person consuming the beverage of, you know, a complex drink with a good taste and a story. There's quite a lot of them around, but unfortunately, we don't really find them so much in the big sort of urban city context, where bang might be consumed, you know, and bang is a regulated good, so it's sold in the government shop. You can find it outside, of course, but primarily, at least I associate it with a bit more of an urban context. Whereas the drinks, we were more in Tethysgar and Jharkhand in Orissa in the tribal region, you know, mostly grains, rice. One of my favorites in Thailand is called sato. There's different forms, but essentially it's a glutinous rice with a little yeast cake called lupang, which is made from a bunch of different local herbs. And essentially, you get a little clay pot and you add your rice and then your lupang and your water. You fill it up with a little bit of water, and then you seal it off the top of the jar is filled off the clay. And that'll be left for a few days and you can just burst, there's like a bamboo straw, you burst the clay seal and you just pop it straight in and drink right out of it. And it's got the most wonderful, like, sour, funky fermentation aroma, frankly. And, you know, that provided a really solid base to push the experiment with infusing different, you know, flavors into it, making it sparkling, that kind of thing. You know, I mean, the equivalent of, you know, a really expensive wine, if it's something going to be like, you know, traditional, there's a lot of racism in the world of food and Thai food, Indian food is very often looked down upon. And so for it to sort of be valued as an equivalent by something like a Michelin inspector, it needs to really be sort of Yeah. Yeah, I bet. So as a sommelier, did you guys did a lot of the experience with like chirpings and stuff crossover into cannabis? Yeah, at the end in my last job, that was something that we were playing with quite a lot. Last two jobs, actually. I was a beverage director for a group, which included some cocktail bars and a couple of restaurants in Bangkok. And they were very sort of progressive and open minded. One of the owners talked a lot of weight. And so it was a little bit easier to sort of swing those things. However, we weren't able to actually roll it out in the dining room because it was before the legalization. And despite, you know, terpenes not having any cannabis, it's not the sort of attention that any sort of restaurant was looking for at that time. But we were playing with it because, you know, apart from the fermented beverages are talking about, they have alcohol in them. And there's a lot of people who don't consume alcohol in Asia. And so we were looking, yeah, much more at doing stuff with tea botanicals, of which, you know, terpenes, key component in almost any that you look at. And so as a stoner, I'm always interested in sort of, you know, finding some oji kush taste in some mad tea from somewhere or something like that, you know. Yeah, yeah, of course. As you got into the Asian political sphere, and you started making these connections and inroads, what caught you then to move from maybe as much of a preservation of Thailand races, which was really, you know, the main starting goal, into working with the farmers and making sure the farmers are absolutely taken care of? I see those two things as absolutely synonymous. That's beautiful. You know, the same picture. Yeah, I mean, I can go in more into detail if you like, but please do. Well, there's a lot of conservation. I see people tagging their indoor grows as preservation runs, you know. And the thing with zoos is that they're pretty big entities that require a lot of coordination and moving parts. And until the advent of pretty strict regulations, and even despite that, they can be pretty dark places. And so when I think of exit to conservation, I think of, yeah, little amateur zoos. It's a noble effort, but ultimately, the only people who can grow significant populations of open pollinated cannabis from land race genetics is people in the traditional land race growing region. I mean, they don't have to contend, at least for now, with all of the licenses that's needed in the West or in North America and Europe. They don't need to contend, at least until recently, they didn't need to contend with hemp farms or contamination, those kinds of things. And so I'm hesitant to say that no preservation can be done outside, because I think it's pretty obvious that it can. But at this point, the focus seems to be so much on getting seeds out of the traditional growing regions and into cryogenic storage or into long-term growing facilities. And there's not much thought going into actually just helping out the farmers who are growing land races in the traditional growing region. And keeping them growing these traditional things. Yeah, they're already doing it. A lot of places, including in Thailand, people are coming over and they're like, oh, well, listen, we need to teach these guys how to be more profitable so they can keep up with the modern industry, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is not the solution either. By modernizing and changing either the target of their growth, for example, they move away from tariff to tricift and bubble hashes in Parvati and other places. This changes the way that the selections are made. And despite being maybe quite subtle, they have long lasting consequences. And so ultimately, we'd be looking at providing essentially a subsidy for growers that are growing a product which unfortunately is not profitable in the modern marketplace, but has significant value for the community and industry as a whole. And giving them that incentive to make the choice to grow these land races despite the disadvantages that are created by legislation, policy, et cetera. Because ultimately, everybody has families to take care of and wants to eat. And so when faced with a choice of or not necessarily the choice when faced with having a long-standing land race growth or no more customers and knowing that all it would take is to switch to a modern cultivar for your market to suddenly open up, that's a choice which almost every land race farmer is facing today. And we need to give them a reason to be like hybrid but keep doing what we're doing. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the multi-state operators dropping the prices below a sustainable price order for producers. Yeah, because they can afford to sustain that. And take that loss for everybody else. Yeah, exactly. So it feels like the same situation with land race farmers. It's like everybody sort of recognizes the value of what they have, but nobody's really willing to actually hook them up or even able really to buy their product. And so it's just kind of going to disappear in the meantime. And that's what we hope to address in the redress. And so what we do essentially is we approach the, it depends who we're approaching and when, but if we can, we're approaching the community as a whole, the village elder or village chief or whatever the equivalent is. And coming up with some sort of agreement for them to continue growing land races and for us to make an attempt at offering their germplasm seeds to the international community for which to breed with. The idea is that, you know, people back home don't need to be concerned with conservation if we actually let the pros take care of it in a way. And then they can have fun creating all the crazy hybrids from the phenohot, which can be done each year in such a, you know, genetically diverse population, right? Yeah. Yeah. So maybe see it. That's amazing, man. The whole, the whole way that you approach it is very, you know, just socially conscious to me. And it's something that's been lacking a lot in cannabis. I think a lot of people that I've seen over the years tend to maybe, I don't want to say exploit the farmers, but it's hard to say anything other than that because they try to get the cheapest absolute price so that they can then take a cut off the seeds over the top and that's how they make their money, you know. But back, it all goes back to what is the incentive for the farmers to keep growing these when people come to them like a, without using any names, like a big seed company, you know, from Amsterdam that says, hey, we'd rather you have you, you know, you give us your land races, we'll store these in germplasm, you can grow some of these feminite seeds in the meantime, you know, like, this is how, this is how things disappear for good. And I appreciate your work on it. Hey, look, I mean, I don't think that we're going to be able to, to prevent the land race is going extinct, unfortunately, but we'll definitely do what we can with, you know, the communities that are willing to work with us to try and keep what we can for as long as we can. But ultimately, it's going to require a concerted effort on behalf of the entire community. Ultimately, there needs to be a demand for Tehuah-driven products and a clear understanding of what Tehuah-driven products are. Ultimately, I think a lot of people, they want to have that experience of the Colombian gold or the tie stick that they had back in the day. And, you know, that was all imported cannabis. And so if we want to return to experiences like that, we need to consider a normalization of trade. Since that's so, so far away, it seems to make sense to support the land race growers in the meantime by breeding with their genetics. So let's define land race as you see it, as you understand it, because that's super important. You know, I hate to do that, actually, because we're not, I don't hate to do it, but I just think that there's a lot of opinions and a lot of words out there. I don't see why we need to reinvent the wheel every time, you know, like my take is not as interesting or I think as accurate as the numerous studies which have been published over the last few decades, you know, dealing with land races and also specifically defining land races. So I would say that I can actually remember the name of the authors of the paper right now. There's a paper called Towards and Evolved Concepts of Land Races, which basically it's looking at the history of the definition of the term and making a proposal that land races should be considered as basically dynamic population, which can be subjected to introgression while still retaining their designation as land races. And that's important because the earliest definitions of land race, von Grumker, for example, but even, you know, until Zeven, which I think was 1998, were much more about static, you know, the land race is a monolithic, never-changing thing, right? And if it becomes polluted, it's gone. And if that's the case, then they're destined for the museum and they'll never, you know, that's not my, that's a quote from the paper, you know, they'll never get out. So in one sense, that makes a lot of sense and one side that makes a lot of sense to me. On the other, I think that the implication of this sort of evolved understanding of land races is underlined by a world view, or sorry, maybe sort of structured by a world view, which cannot consider a future where indigenous people might be sort of left in peace to grow alone, you know, like the paper can't even consider that, which bothers me fundamentally because as a naive dreamer, I suppose, I'd like to imagine a future where, you know, everybody could be left alone. But I suppose that is somewhat unrealistic. So, you know, given the context, the capitalism will continue to expand into every single possible market that it can. Land race, cannabis in traditional growing regions, far away from the nearest road, city, no exception. You know, if that's the case, then I think that that paper does make a lot of sense. If we are going to integrate these communities into the global economy and their crops into the global economy as commodities, then certainly, there needs to be some sort of new look at how we define land races. I would basically say, yeah, go read the studies, don't listen to me, like I've got nothing fresh to say on the definition of land races, you know, I'm a bit boring on that. I'm happy to defer to the scientists. But that's a great answer, because, you know, some people will insert their opinions as facts, stated very confidently, and that's that, you know, and the real answer is, man, just got to do, look, check out the research and stay up to date with the research, right? Yeah, yeah, because it's changing, you know, and it has changed. And the way we interpret the study ourselves, you know, I read it, you read it, and somehow we come up with two slightly different conclusions, you know, so I would rather instead of, because I see that something that's happening a lot. I'm constantly having these conversations, and I feel like instead of constantly reinventing the wheel and giving our opinions as to what the definitions of these things are, we should maybe be doing more reading as a community and seeing what, you know, the biologists have to say about land races, because there's a lot of work done for corn land races, for weeds, et cetera. And despite the fact that there's very few cannabis specific studies, there's a lot of studies on similar organisms, hops, et cetera that we can learn a lot from. Yeah. So people that are watching this, probably one of the reasons they're going to come to watch a show about Thailand races, and we talked about this yesterday, what is the chocolate tie? It's always the first question I get. I've worked with a line called chocolate tie from a dude named Drough, who supposedly sourced it from the people that DNA down in Aaron sourced it from to make chocolate look back in the day. There's of course all these fantastic legends and fables of pasta, dips, you know, heroin infused cannabis. There's all these tales of what chocolate tie is. In your experience, what have you learned about chocolate tie? Very, very little. And I think that's the message here, is that in Thailand, the area which produced cannabis, the largest area, Isan, was incredibly like really, really poor until quite recently. And the idea that farmers were sort of walking around eating Nestle chocolate and naming things. I'm not saying no one had ever heard of chocolate in Isan in the 70s, but it's an English word. And it's, in my opinion, a pretty sort of pretty clearly, it's partners who, you know, had some accession or selection, more bags of weed with seeds in it, you know, and they had, you know, chocolate. I really, because I really can't speak on DNA or anything like that at all, like a peak of is, you know, having gone through the motions myself, asking pretty much everybody that I can deal with chocolate tie and, you know, being met with the same thing. One issue is that a lot of the traditional knowledge here in Thailand has sort of slowly been sort of dissipating and coming unstructured. And a lot of the young men are learning from the same sources that we are. And so you'll meet some especially ethnic pie, like they'll be maybe aware of chocolate tie. And maybe if you rocked up to Thailand in a few years ago and you asked for it, you would have got something and they would have told you it was chocolate tie. I don't know. I can't speak for anything like that. But what I can say is that as far as large open pollinated populations of cannabis that we could describe as land race, that the farmers are sort of engaging with and in their head conceiving of as chocolate tie, that doesn't exist as far as I know. What I can say though, to give people some hope. Exactly. Exactly. The aroma of chocolate, also that of coffee, dark, earthy, musty aromas are very typical of narrow leaf drug type land race when it's been subjected to compression curing, which I think a lot of you will know is tie sticks. And so I guess when you have this sort of this mechanical pressure plus temperature plus time, we see significant impact on the terpene profiles. When we can add anaerobic conditions on occasion, aging underground or these days in vacuum seals, we do see some pretty funky aromas coming out of it. But one thing that's quite consistent is sort of earthy chocolatey character. That's something that I've had a lot in my time in Southeast Asia, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Myanmar, and elsewhere with the older, you know, six months plus cured stuff. And so I don't want to speculate too much, but I think it would be interesting if there turned out to be some sort of terpene, which was sort of maybe biotynthesized during this aging process and was leading to that. It could also be a combination of different compounds, which are leading to this smell. But yeah, there's definitely something to research there. And I think for those interested in the chocolate pie, your best bet is to phenohunt the lao-isan gene pool. And so for that, you can approach squirrel tail, tiger tail, thymango, snake teeth, a bunch of other stuff. And, you know, you'll find pretty consistently, you know, applying these compression curing techniques that you'll have these chocolate aromas. They're delicious, by the way. If you nail it, you're looking at a slow degradation of the chlorophyll, leaving almost everything else intact. And so you've got a very smooth smoke, which doesn't have this sort of full green character, which chlorophyll brings, which is so ubiquitous, the smoking cannabis flower. And I'll say as a note that, you know, just as a sort of curiosity, a couple of times we've had some some some professional summaries coming into our, we're partnered with a dispensary in Bangkok, and they have a total of 64 strains in the, in the, in the short front now. And we let all the summaries smell them, and they're like, yeah, next, next, next, next, next. They get to the compression cured Lao gold landrace, and they're like, oh, what's this? Because it's the only one that doesn't smell green, and doesn't have that chlorophyll. And in wine, green is an aroma that's very sort of, it's viewed as a flaw almost universally. And so, yeah, I think that there's, there's something to be explored there. And I think that there's a reason why so many people are in love with this chocolate high, with the myth of it, with the story, because there is something there that's, you know, rewarding, delicious. I just don't think it's a strain, a strain. It's proper. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is growing up here. And in the 90s, early 90s, getting a lot of Mexican compressed brick constant. And in that Mexican compressed brick, I've always said it smelled like minty chocolate, but definitely a cocoa type smell. And I want, I mean, it was compression cured and sat forever. So it kind of speaks to talking about very, very, very interesting. You mentioned, of course, the infamous tiger tails, squirrel tail. Can we start talking about some of these different, what you would call like maybe an expression of these different land races or? Yeah, yeah, sure. So it's gone really confusing. And that's the picture that I'm trying to paint. Yeah. The way I'm explaining it's probably going to be a bit confused. And what I'm explaining is very confusing. Yeah. Essentially, the first attestation to the words, squirrel tail in the Laos script that we saw was in reference to traditional kit weaving, which is a style or a squirrel tail is a pattern found in traditional kit weaving, which today is practiced in silk. And I think one day I'd like to find if I can, a traditional tie historic, you know, a weaving historian, if that exists. Oh, right. Did they make it with hemp? Because that would be my, my media hunch. Yeah, I mean, squirrel tail, the tiger tail. These are many things. It's all down to the, the Laos, Yisan, we can call it. So on both sides of the Mekong in Thailand and Laos live Laos speakers in the high side. It's referred to as a region of Yisan or the Korat Plateau. And essentially the words that are used to describe cannabis of a certain archetype are squirrel tail, tiger tail, etc. So squirrel tail describes like a big, like cheerleader, like pom-pom style, but you know, like really like big, like lots of leaves, like puffy. And then the tiger tail is the, it's more like the creeper. I've heard it referred to in English as a creeper. That makes sense. Like Robert Clark described creepers. I think so. Yeah. So you have a lot of lateral branching low to the ground with these branches sometimes forming new roots and then big swoopy main colas. And strangely, the English translation for tiger tail is sometimes rendered as rudder. And I'm not sure who got confused, the English speakers of the tide, but some of the ties have also been telling me that no, this is rudder as in like boat rudder. Yeah. Something they'd be most used to seeing. I don't know, but in that sense, I'm thinking just like a long upright rigid object, but you know, because if you look at some of the tiger tail, they really do like they have this huge main top colon and the branching's all really low to the side. There's quite, as with a lot of these things, there's a lot of different stories. But so far, you know, the, we were able to differentiate between the structure on these two. And then also the structure for the, for the snake teeth, which is the, the vine like growth, kind of like Dr. Grinspoon, where you have running calyx structure. And then the mango or would be the, you know, the mercy and rich accession. But it's also pretty common to find mango aromas in squirrel tail, tiger tail, and the snake teeth. So ultimately, I think that originally it would have been a singular gene pool, which during its dissemination and the cross-cultural contact between the ties, the Lao and other groups in the region, seeds were exchanged, plants were exchanged. And we ended up with both autoctonus, you know, land-raised populations, big open pollinated populations. Sorry, autoctonus and aloctonus in different regions. A bunch of inbred lines, some single plants, reproductions from single seeds, you know, multiplied into millions and then disseminated and then met. And a lot of them carry the same names. So I think it's best understood, you know, as archetypes within the gene pool, that have since become established as their own land races and in some cases, more like modern strains as in IBL, etc. Yeah, yeah. And all of them coexisting temporally and geographically, in some cases, pollinating each other. Yeah, it's just like really, really complicated. We basically have done our best to to ignore everything that we sort of hear and focus on what we see and look for large, open, pollinated populations that breed true, that seem to have, you know, seem to express what we consider to look more like a primordial character. But ultimately, as long as the population size is big enough and it's grown in open pollination, then, you know, that fits the base criteria. And so we're looking to collect from everything. But what we're sort of getting involved in heavily is what we can determine to be the more, I don't want to use the word pure because it's not accurate, but the stuff which is grown properly, managed properly, and not just, you know, every single little thing that we can find. Because honestly, it's a rabbit hole. There's at this point, since legalization, every single uncle, you know, whoever had a single plant in his back garden making seeds and selling them, giving them away, you know, people are selling clones for about 30 cents a clone on the side of the street in Bangkok out of little trucks and stuff. And so there's this really intense sort of mixing and hybridization of everything going on at the moment. But that's just sort of the culmination of the last 40, 50 years. And so as far as the Lao Isan gene pool is concerned, we've been looking at plants that, you know, look like a squirrel tail, look like a tiger tail, and are kept in big open pollinated growth in fairly remote regions where we can. And basically, that's taken us out of Isan for the most part, and into the more hilly regions, where we can find that, you know, we can get that distance that's required to, you know, to totally prevent the cross contamination. So you've done, you've done a lot of work in Thailand, so, you know, try to pick apart a lot of these stories. And over time, it seems like Zomia is kind of spread out a little bit. Are there any other areas that you've been really excited about that you've been looking into? I mean, you've talked about, you know, around Thailand, there's, you know, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, are there other places in there that you're excited about or elsewhere? Yeah, absolutely. Cambodia is, you know, the place that I've spent the most time personally, so I have a really soft spot for, for Cambodia and one of my best friends are, are Cambodian people that, you know, they were little rascals and now they're big rascals. And we're looking forward to being able to, to return there probably this year and look at what we can do to expand our collection, try and see if we can recruit some, some different communities into, into the collective and bring out some new seeds. Otherwise, Laos, you know, that's always one of the most interesting regions. If you're, you know, the Thai nationalism prevents them from admitting how good the Laotian weed is and the Laotian reverse with the Thai, they're both excellent. There's a lot of synergy there. And, you know, Laos has a few iconic areas producing, you know, land race cannabis that we're really looking forward to, to go to. In particular, the, the Sipan Don, the, the, the 4000 islands, which is basically an area of the Mekong, where there's cataracts on the border with Cambodia and Laos, and Mekong spreads out into these loads of, of islands. And it's a pretty well-known tourist destination, a place where a lot of people have, you know, fond memories of kicking back and fishing and smoking grape pop from the 60s onwards. And it has, you know, there's not a lot of places left on the Mekong, the islands, which grow this beautiful golden weed, which all the old timers are looking for. And so that's probably going to be one of the priorities in terms of where we're going to be going around. It's not necessarily grown within the main areas, but, you know, along the cataracts, there's, there's a lot of people growing here and there, and we're looking forward to getting some seeds. So yeah, golden Mekong weed, Laos, that's going to be, I think that's going to be a big hit with the old timers. But there's a lot of stuff in the north of the stream near the border with Yunnan. And then of course the, the Bolavon Plateau, that's a beautiful coffee growing region with a significant amount of local population belonging to the Lavon ethnic group, who's very talented cannabis growers. There's so much in Laos that we can explore. It's really a very, very diverse country, very small, but with a lot of diversity in cannabis and the people, the landscapes and everything. Myanmar unfortunately is this, you know, I mean, it feels a bit silly saying, unfortunately, in the context of seeds, because that's not really what makes it sad, obviously. But Myanmar is undergoing, you know, severe political upheaval, civil war. If anybody, you know, wants to help out, they're taking volunteers in Chiang Mai right now, you can go and sign up to go fight for the, for the militias that are fighting against the government. It's, it's absolute chaos out there. It's been getting really, really, really bad. And, you know, we, we're not doing anything in Myanmar right now. Yeah. Yeah, doesn't make any sense. It doesn't sound very safe right now. Or, or, I mean, people's priorities are different right now. Yeah, that's it. People's priorities are different. And we don't feel like we've spoken to, you know, to our contacts out there and we theoretically could get seeds out, but it just, again, it doesn't seem like a priority. I think the priority probably seems to be for us now to continue focusing on our work in Cambodia, Laos, and in the Northeast of India in, you know, Mizoram, Chippura, Nagaland, etc. But we're also very, very excited to be bringing out some, some Colombian genetics, hopefully soon. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, we're all very excited about that. This is a lot of similarities with the tie it seems between, you know, the Caribbean and Latin American gene pools. We're looking forward to having closer collaboration with us and, you know, growers, members of our collective in that group and together try to build a better picture of, you know, what's going on with the land races between the two regions. A lot of similarities in the, in the setting up semi outdoor curing styles with golden weed as a result, that kind of thing. And so our, yeah, our boys are based in Calca, but they're mobile. So we're looking forward to bringing out some, some genetics from there pretty, pretty, pretty soon. Pretty sure the next drop, although the current drop is Parvati. I just, we just came back from Himachal Pradesh, but I think next is going to be, yeah, in that order, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, followed by, followed by India again. Can we talk about some of the current recent accessions that you got that are on your side right now? Let's talk about some of those. So people have a, an understanding for you other than what you write, which is, like, that's kind of what initially drew me to you, you know, a good friend of Neville's sent me to your site and said, you've got to check these guys out, man. Like, this is legit. And it's not just, it's not just descriptions like lulling you in with, you know, words and marketing. It's how you collected it. It's how you listed the accessions. It's done very well. Like, in my opinion, very scientifically and all the details that people need to know. A lot of people will, of course, be wondering, like, what is this taste and smell like? What's the THC content? You know, like, what's the high? And, and, and not, not understanding that, like, they're thinking of it from a very modern mindset of what's this going to be like in my room, indoors. And we just, it's not something you can really tell them, you know, how this plant that grows outdoors in, in this expresses in this environment, how it's going to be indoors in your environment where it's never been, you know? So, yeah, please talk about some of your, your more recent accessions and what people can expect. Sure. Sure. So, yeah, like, like you said, we don't really, we don't really put, you know, like expected yields or, you know, we do, we do go into terpene profiles a little bit, but, you know, not massively and certainly not THC percentage or anything. Exactly. I'd like to note that, you know, we've found some accessions in Cambodia, which have very few trichome heads on them. However, they absolutely flat. And so I'm just going to go ahead and go on a limb and say that maybe there's even some other kind of annoyance at play there. And so, you know, measuring, you know, that strange quality or that accession quality based on its THC percentage just seems like an absurdity. Yeah, it does. There's so many missing cannabinoids out there, like that we don't, that aren't tested for. We have no clue what is causing some of these highs. Right. Right. So, for as far as the most recent accessions, we were in Parvati Valley, which is, you know, one of the true hotspots of land races in the world, in India. It's maybe not as much of a priority as far as conservation goes. The farmers there are pretty, pretty well off and doing pretty well. In fact, they don't really need our help in the same way that farmers in Southeast Asia do. But it's important to us because Parvati is one of the most visible, one of the most famous of the growing regions in the whole world. And so, you know, without having, you know, a few pictures and some accessions from Milana, it's really hard to have that clout as a, you know, a land race collective, you know. Is that where Milana is in Parvati Valley? Or is it called a valley? It is. It is. Yeah, yeah, it is. So Parvati is in the state of Himachal Pradesh, which basically means like the, you know, the Himachal province and Mechal is like a heavenly mountain, I believe, in Bahari. And it's the, you know, the place outside of Kathmandu. So basically, a lot of Parvati Valley is in Himachal Pradesh, which is in the north of India near the border with China and not so far away from Pakistan, Kashmir's in between. It's in the northwest of the country. And it's basically a hub for cannabis growing since the 1960s as one of the sort of the tail ends of the hippie trail, you know, other than Kathmandu and Nepal. And starting, I'm not exactly sure when, but, you know, I would say maybe late 70s, early 80s, a lot of Italians coming to Parvati, La Paz and Milana villages in particular, and getting involved with Chara's production there. So it's had a big international reputation. And in Europe, Parvati hash is not necessarily the most common. But in a lot of places in Italy, in this kind of Navian countries, is one of the prestige hash that is available on offer. And so for us, it seemed like, you know, a very priority, let's say basically, because, you know, when foreigners are learning and educating themselves about landraces, one of the first places that they learn about is generally Milana, Kassol, you know, Dosh, this kind of thing. And so we felt like in order to bring attention to smaller villages in other parts of India and other countries in Thailand, that it was in the best interest of approaching and working with the farmers there. And so, but the farmers there, they're not, conservation is needed everywhere, but Milana, and maybe not Milana, but Parvati Valley as a whole is one of the more stable, one of the larger landrace producing regions that people there are holding on to their traditions pretty hard. And so it's not necessarily an area where we can engage in necessarily the same type of conservation work that we can in tribal regions in the Northeast of India or elsewhere. But it's somewhere where we, you know, could source some very high quality seeds from very, very famous gardens, maybe, you know, do our part in helping to build up the body of knowledge for what could eventually be an appellation system in the region. And, you know, that in particular is something that on a personal level, I'd love to see happen and, you know, it'd be a privilege to be involved in anything even remote to that. I think Parvati is one of the grand cru, so to speak, of the cannabis world. There's a lot of, it's a storied place with a big diversity of, in French, we call them milieu dix and climat. They refer to the smallest geographic designation, basically individual plots, sometimes having multiple within one vineyard. And so, you know, in Parvati, we see a similar system with very small individual plots making up a constellation that forms a larger sort of system that spreads out the whole valley. And so that provides us with a lot of different expressions, you know, of that gene pool from the various sort of terroir of the area, whether they be the dark side of the valley with a lot of humidity, a lot of rain, or, you know, the best, most sunny spots at high altitude above Malana village, right? And everything in between. And so in total, we made 74 accessions, which I, maybe it's, I don't need to, but I just want to find out, like, how much tracking was involved. You know, gardens that are, you know, between, let's say 2,100 to 3,000, 4,000 meters, basically at the highest. So between, well, like 6,000 to almost 12,000 feet. And a lot of the villages, for example, Tosh, maybe I don't know the exact altitude with Tosh, the Rasol is 2,600 or so. And the Vairam fields above it are hitting 3,000, right? And so you need to get up to Rasol and then up to the fields beyond. So similarly to, in Southeast Asia, where next to the rice fields, there's these little huts where they dry out a lot of the products and where they rest during the hot parts of the day, there's rubbing houses in a lot of the higher fields in Parvati. And so a lot of the time we were hanging out with the boys there and asking them, you know, like, you know, what's the name of this garden, what's the name of that garden, you know, can you make sure you separate plants from those two next time you rub, we'll give you more money. Honestly, they think we're stupid because they're like, why would the foreigner pay more just for knowing that it comes from one garden and not the other? And then like, let's put some fucking stamps on the charis. Yeah, right? That's very Western mentality. But I think it's rewarding and it helps the farmers to differentiate their product without having any change on the product itself. And it helps us, again, to bring a better, clearer picture of what is going on in the gene pool in that area and to represent that visually, a text and with our seeds. I'm really excited about that. You were telling a story yesterday about hand rubbing that I thought was fascinating. And like the one thing that like, as a person who might have a few OCDs, like the idea of hand rubbing, like to me, is skin cells and stuff like that, like that drives nuts. But I understand the tradition and the quality that goes along with this. And you had an interesting story about like how bad it can screw up your hands. Can you tell me a little bit about that so people can understand what goes into this? Yeah, I'm actually what I didn't mean to emphasize that. Honestly, like the, I think the eyelashes are more of a concern than really. Yeah, yeah, because you like, you'll never even really see the skin cell. You'll just notice that your hands feel a bit papery and thin, right? And then, you know, if you let them dry out afterwards, they'll get all ragged. But yeah, you'll often notice little eyelashes, because they're always hunched over when they're, yeah, or when they're rubbing. So basically, you know, everybody, all the foreigners, they come up to Parvati for the first time and they have it in their head that they're going to, you know, run naked through the field of weed, maybe. Yeah, something like that, right? And if you wanted to, I mean, you'd get some stairs. And then I also want to say, before I say anything else, you know, because a lot of these conversations in the past have led to people going to where we've talked about on the back of me explaining where the grows are. If you go to Milano Valley and you touch any plants, expect to pay about a $500 fine for every plant that you touch every time you touch one. They are not so keen on foreigners coming in. And in other places, which you can, yeah, probably run naked through the fields as you imagine you could. And, you know, the first thing is like, okay, well, I'm not going to buy hash while I'm here, because I'm a cannabis nerd. And I know how it's made. So I'm going to rub it myself. So you wait early and you go up and rub and rub and you'll notice that unless you're doing this regularly, it takes a big toll on your hands. The terpenes are somewhat caustic and you're applying a lot of pressure onto your palms. And specifically when you're collecting the matter at the end, you're pressing your thumb. Not only is it pretty bad on your joints pretty quickly, but you'll notice blisters on your thumb if your technique isn't on point. So I think that, yeah, for people who have these kind of like, you know, whether it's OCD or just, you know, being concerned about hygiene, which is reasonable, you know, I get that. Yeah, yeah. I can't even see the skin cells. But like, even when I, when I'm like doing that at home, like going through picking seeds and I've got like, caked, caked resin on my hands, I'm thinking, what if I smoke this? It's not really going to be perfect, you know? But also, also, knowing about Milana cream, that is like, in my mind, like, supposed to be what the ultimate hash, what I understand Milana cream. So that's like, there's no way any skin cell would make me pass up some Milana cream to try. You know, the top level cream will have very few skin cells in it because the whole point of cream is for it to be very delicately rubbed. Yes. And so when you do rub it delicately, there's, you know, and also we're talking about, you know, for, for someone with soft hands who doesn't rub every year, then yeah, it's going to be filled with skin cells. That's a good point. For a very calloused hand, not so much. Yeah. Yeah. I will say though that during the season, you'll find the whole village is empties. And, you know, in a way you could, child exploitation or whatever, but I mean, it's not really like they have such thing as childcare up in the hills either. So we'll leave the kids home. They come with and the whole family rubs. And you better believe that the dad is going to tell you later like, yo, this was my 16 year old daughter who rubbed this her hands are really soft. You can pay more for this. You know, I bet. Yeah. They do that. They're always like, no, no, this is the youngest, you know, this is my wife or it's always the wife daughter who gets the highest prices. That's funny. Very typical though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is there like, you mentioned Columbia, is there any other like pie in the sky like ideas you want to pull off with Somia that you haven't yet? Yeah. We'd like to, I mean, a lot of things. We'd love to get more into the production and aging and then selling of high stick and cherish. Those are what we're passionate about traditional compression curing and traditional hand rubbing, you know, the artisanal crafts, which don't involve the mediation of many tools or machinery in the elaboration of traditional cannabis products. That's always going to be something that we want to get involved in. So I just maybe if you'll allow me want to go back a little bit to Milana. Oh man. Yeah. No, I think I think that there's a bit more nuance that needs to be explained here. So the cream, the charris is rubbed from domesticate plants, which over the course of the last 25 years in particular, every single farmer who's been around long enough to see it talks about a decline in THC levels and in trichome density. And so it went from being a lesser amount of plants needed to rub 10 grams to a much higher amount of plants needed to rub 10 grams. And so my personal experiences in India were not in Parvati Valley, actually the first ones. They were in mostly in Kinar, in Spiti, in the more remote regions of Himachal Pradesh, where there's much less of a tourist drug trade and much more of local traditional consumption. And there the charris is referred to as jungli, jungli being the word which gave us the word in English for jungle. It means forest in Hindi and his forest hash in that regards can be thought of as hash rubbed from feral plants. Yes. Now the hash rubbed from feral plants in my opinion, that is the pinnacle of the world of charris because not only have the domesticate plants been losing, I can't really explain much more about why, but the testimony of the farmers that they're losing THC content over time. Whereas the feral plants are becoming irrelevant with very few people outside of like, for example in Kulu, which is at the bottom of the valley, it's a much bigger city, it's outside of Parvati, you'll find drug addicts like, you know, going and rubbing hands worth from the feral plants on, you know, dusty ass plants on the side of the road. That happens. But more and more in the main sort of producing villages like Rasol, Malana, there are far less feral plants now than there were before because the feral plants are often the first to be targeted in eradication campaigns, you know, the cops will come and put a little bit of pressure and the cops themselves probably won't be clearing the field, but they'll be telling the villagers to clear the fields. And they'll clear the feral plants below the village that are in plain view of the path that was up, which, you know, and that doesn't satisfy the cops, then maybe they'll cut down a few domestic fields. So I think that really the sort of the pinnacle, the holy grail, whatever you want to call it, is the, the jungly is the, and not all jungly is equal, it needs to be from an audience who can rub very well and can rub a good quality cream slowly without much contaminant. But if you rub from feral plants, you can expect a bigger diversity of cannaminoids and terpenes, which, you know, when consumed fresh or aged leads to much more pronounced and distinct experience. And I think that's where the magic of, of, of Parvati and Charis in general is, is live resin made from, you know, live plants. Funnily enough, all the, all the Gora, you know, all the foreigners, they're pretty excited about consuming it fresh because that's when it's really terpy, but also quite caustic on the throat. All the locals swear by smoking it after a year, when it's lost a lot of its taste, but it's much smoother and provides a more meditative narcotic kind of effect. That's really interesting. I think so too, man. I love going out there and trying all this stuff. You know, the locals are like, you were like, because it's, they don't have some, they produce a lot, but they don't produce a lot of the best grades. You normally need to commission that. So if you wanted, say a few kilos of super cream or something, you'd need to come in advance and say, I want you to make and need to trust and stuff. And so when you're sort of going there on the spot and asking them, give me your best stuff, they're kind of like, don't smoke it too quick. And I'm like, here, I'm on a mission, try everything. As best as possible. So you better believe, you know. Yeah, dude. Man, I, you know, usually my, I have my co-host Nato with me. And right now, I would be making a joke about sending him over to suitcase, some a lot of cream and bring it back. You know what I mean? The, the old traditional suitcase. If you get my drift. Yeah. I remember back in, uh, I was in Denmark for a little brief period of time. Met a Danish chick and they're pretty famous for bringing, bringing the dudes back to Denmark. And anyway, they got this little hippie commune there that sort of or anarchist commune that, um, let's change a lot, but basically there's kind of this marketplace and it's all, it's changed a lot, a lot, a lot. So, but back in the day, I remember there was always, um, ass hash or briefcase hash, um, like eggs or super flat or bricks of Kashmiri that came, God knows. But you know, it was always like the, the briefcase hash. Yeah, man. That was. Yeah. Yeah. How often did you use the ass hash? Honestly, I don't know. You know, like, you know, like, uh, there's that study with Madrid where they found that like every sample of, uh, kind of, of hash that they, they found was contaminated fecal matter. Oh, wow. Do you ever heard of that? Yeah. Yeah. Brutal. Look, I think, you know, I'm not, that's definitely not something I'm looking to consume. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, in order to maybe sort of contextualize this and, um, everything else that might seem a little bit odd about hygiene that we're talking about, um, I, I think I'd like to sort of, um, explain a little bit about how, um, you know, an analogy in winemaking would be the most illustrative. Um, and it's that when you have an old winery with, you know, very porous walls from an old traditional building, you know, one that wasn't built, you know, up to code or according to what some bureaucrats wanted, just traditional building, you know, people knocked it up because they needed it. Um, those walls will accumulate yeast and all these things over long, long periods of time. But when you're talking about a country which has, you know, a heavy bureaucracy, especially when it comes to things like food products, you know, the US does not allow like, I mean, maybe this has changed, but I remember like, it was a big deal that the US didn't allow like raw cow's milk cheese, which is like the best cheese. Yeah. The live, you know, lactic bacteria culture leads to much more complexity of taste and flavor, but there are huge big hygiene, you know, concerns in the US, which confuses me because I also get told on the other side that standards are lax compared to the EU. And so I think without being a chauvinist or without trying to, I'd like to, I don't know, I guess praise the Europeans for having that sort of ability to be very hygienic when they think that it matters. Yeah. For example, during the harvesting of the grapes and everything else, but allowing certain contaminants during other parts of the process because they're either a part of the traditional method, or they have some sort of an impact on the taste or something. In that regards, I kind of placed the skin cells in that regard. If you're a craft beer drinker, you'll probably see the Brett beer that's came about in the last sort of 10 years or so. And, you know, we describe it as like barnyard aromas and smells, right, and taste. We find it very typically in, well, it's caused by a bacterial infection, which you can get rid of through proper hygiene. I find it a lot in French wines. And, you know, the Americans, you know, they have tasting panels when the supermarkets are going to buy like hundreds of liters of stuff. And they're like, nope. And it took, you know, decades and for the craft beer hipsters to come out and be like, no, these bacteria are actually okay. And we're going to incorporate them, you know, voluntarily into the beer. And then that's still in the mind. But there is a big difference sort of, there's a big difference in the way that traditional tehuat-driven products are conceived of and the requirements. You know, a lot of people where I come from might say that if you create a formula and you sanitize everything, then it can't express the the soil and the culture and the life, you know. Yeah. So bear that in mind if you feel a little bit disgusted by finger hash. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, I can't see it. But in the back of my mind, it's always there, you know, just like some of those proteins. Yeah, I get that. You know, I will, I'll tell you what, what you really should worry about. And this is, this is a significant concern actually is, is adulterance. Adulterance caused by the, I mean, the size of the, of the fields in place like Parvati or in Uttarakhand, they've increased massively, you know, 10-fold, 100-fold or in, you know, different places over the course of the last few decades and they still can't quite meet demand. And so, you know, there's always sort of a lack of product. And for example, in Parvati, the backstop is made up by Nepalis who themselves make up the, the labor in class in Himachal Pradesh. And they also often rub hash on contract for Himachali landowners. And if they can't meet their quotas, they'll incorporate a little bit of Nepali hash into, into the Milana to bulk it out so they can get a better price per gram from their landlord. And then down in the, in the valley, it's definitely being contaminated or adulterated with all sorts of things like Duke, like incense sticks, henna, just mud, random crap, just in order to, to, you know, bulk it up. And I mean, I don't know, explain why they do, everybody knows why they do it. But when you're getting on the top quality, and you know, it's not adulterated, what then you need to make sure, you know, you're probably going to want to rub it yourself if you're worried about hygiene is that they do stuff like when they're first starting, they'll rub their eyebrows in order to get some oil on their fingers. And that'll provide the, the first, you know, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to lift the trichomes off of the, off of the plant. So in the, they need, you need good weather conditions and you need your hands to be the, basically the perfect humidity and smooth. If they're too dry or something, it's not a real problem. If your hands do need to be conditioned, somehow the easiest way is to spit on them or to rub your hair, to rub behind your ears, to rub your eyebrows. And they do that. And the most oily part of your face. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They got to save them. And so, yeah, honestly, I probably shouldn't be saying this up on but it's the truth, you know, it's part of the culture. And frankly, when you're combusting it, yeah, you're burning the shit out of it. But I understand the icky part of it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, it's just one of those things as an OCD person like that. It just, yeah, but I, I can get over it pretty easily. I mean, I just think back to the shit that was in like hard drugs that I did. And it's like the finger, like worrying about skin compared to some of the cut that was in hard drugs, like it just, it seems silly, but yeah, there we are. So a lot of people that are going to be going to your side after watching the show, which is Zomia Cannabis Co. Zomia Cannabis Co. We do start by consensus. And the consensus was an unwieldy and cumbersome website name and advantages of being a, you know, a collective led by consensus. But yeah, ZomiaCanabisCo.com. So one of the first questions that people are going to be asking, and I know and you're probably going to get a hundred emails about this after. So I figured maybe let's just try to curb some of the emails. So what's, what's one of the lines you would recommend for a California indoor garden from your indoor light garden from your selections? So I think that there's like, it's kind of like the Chinese restaurants in the UK or the US, you know, people feel more comfortable with kind of like an intermediary or familiarity of some sorts. Yeah, sweet and diversion, perhaps a little bit less spicy. And so in that regards, I think some of the Landrace IBLs can be quite appropriate for growers who lack the confidence to approach, you know, a long flowering varietal. In that regards, the classic sort of lowland tie stick accession from us would be the Dai Deng, which is the transliteration for red thread. That's the legendary red thread tie sticks from from back in the day. We're working with a clan from Nakampanam who have been working with old seedstock reproducing in a pretty large population now, since quite a few years before legalization. Yeah, and so that would be a little bit shorter flowering, a little bit more, it's still going to have a lot of vigor, but it's going to be a bit more uniform in its canopy and its growth patterns. And so as far as the sort of the very equatorial lines, I think that would be a really approachable line for beginners. Saying that, the picture, I think that's on the background here of the post of the, is the greenhouse tree. And that's a skull Karen genetics from the King Kachan National Park area on the border with Myanmar and Thailand. Yeah, you see its huge plant grows really vigorously, you know, it's resistant to everything. You don't need to walk as much, don't need to feed it much, it just grows like hell. And so if space isn't your concern, you know, then, you know, you can consider going for something like that. But ultimately, if you're working with really stretchy, long flowering varietals like this, there are quite a few tricks that you can take to both shorten the flowering and to manage the canopy more evenly, maybe we can get a little bit. Yeah, please do. People are going to be wanting those. Well, so I would say that if you have the ability, if you're not a commercial grower, even if you are and have the ability to sacrifice a space for a cycle in order to do phenohunts, I think that's the way to do it. The idea of, you know, stabilizing phenose and also you're going to be dealing with the intersex traits that are common in the Landry's gene pools of Asia. Yeah. And so, you know, breeding with those can be a bit of a challenge. However, doing mass selections, phenohunts based on big amounts, then putting your cuttings from select mothers directly into flower in small plots with a high planting density, you can turn pretty fast cycles and you can get really good yields. And so I would say if you have the ability to do so, please attempt to follow this path as it's probably the most commercially viable. Otherwise, the Indian land races from Himalayas, they're going to be somewhat shorter than the ties. The difference would be 24 to 20 weeks or 20 to six weeks, not huge. But still, if you're somebody who struggles to maintain the plant's health during long flowering periods, then maybe you're looking, you know, to shorten that down a little bit, you'll find that in the cultivars from higher altitude and from more northernly locations. In general, your Tiber idols, your Cambodians, your Laotians are going to be depending on, you know, you and your grow. We've seen seven meter plants in the village, in Sa Gang, in Myanmar. So that's your upper limit. Yeah. So generally speaking, LST, a lot of pruning, a lot of cutting back, topping, et cetera, the techniques that can benefit you. If you have the ability to let the plants grow without any sort of topping, they do respond better to them. These plants are not used to being individually coddled. They're land race plants coming from huge fields. The farmers do not pay attention to single plant. The fields are too far away, too high up, too remote, et cetera. And so, you know, a lot of them will never, ever have been topped for, you know, and we've seen that given the intersex traits being a little bit of an issue for some people, if you have the ability to not stress them out, then, you know, don't stress them out. But at the same time, you know, we're saying that in order to err on the side of caution. My personal experience has been incredibly resistant, hardy, vigorous, tolerant plants that basically take whatever you throw at them. And I find it funny to contrast that with the image that a lot of people have as these really sort of finicky and difficult to grow plants, like, no, not at all, the opposite. They're difficult to make them stop growing. You're trying to manage them. And that's a whole different, new different set of problems, basically. I think a lot of that is from people trying to bring in stuff that's been acclimated to Thailand, outdoors to indoors, and they just don't get it. Like they're trying to feed it, you know, GH nutrients, like just stuffing it, pulling nutrients and stuff. And that's not what a lot of these landraces want. They don't respond well to that. Of course, it'll make them finicky. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think one place where the cannabis industry is really far behind in regards to, in regards to the wine industry or other teeth is in terms of understanding soil compositions and minerals, et cetera. The, you know, clearly fertile, lonely soils, lots of water, that is strong vegetative growth. That is not what we're seeking to necessarily do, especially with plants that have such a long flowering period, we're trying to reduce the overall cycle. In the wine industry, for example, we find such techniques as partial root dehydration, which will serve to stress the plant in very tactical ways in order to induce specific physiological changes that we want to see in the plant's phytochemical makeup, right? More in the phytochemical makeup. And so as far as that goes with these landraces, you'll find that they're not growing in sort of like these beautiful pristine soils. Like, you know, like we're talking about like, if we're in Cambodia a lot of the time, this is going to be maybe a bit sad to hear. These days, the grows are no longer next to the Mekong or sort of flood plain areas. They're in freshly deforested rainforest, which is often been deforested for timber or sometimes specifically for growing cannabis. And so in that regards, the jungle soils are often very, very poor. In Parvati Valley, we see totally degraded soils from overuse of urea and very, very, very acidic soils on the bottom of slopes where everything's sort of draining down and accumulating. And the plants are still thriving relatively. We've got different criteria here too. When you're growing 25 acres on a hillside, it doesn't really matter if you have one or two plants that are a little bit raggedy looking, especially no one's ever going to see the flower. It's going to get rubbed anyway. So yeah, it's a little bit of a different concerns in that regard. That makes sense. Yeah. The way we treat plants in the U.S. compared to these big massive fields is night and day different. It's cute, you know, taking care of your babies. And for people that are worried about intersex traits and stuff, just remember, like anything, if you're watching this, anything intersex, like any other trait in cannabis, whether it's purple, whether it's a scent, it can be bred out or bred in, you know? I mean, this is something that can be selected for or selected again. So if you're scared of things like that, it's very easy to work out. Well, yes, yeah, I agree with you. I think I'd like to offer some perspective to, one, the landraces are going through our patterns of cultivation, including periods of time where many males are being culled before reverting to total open pollination for a few decades, for example. That'll be enough to bring out intersex traits in your population. And if you're talking about, you know, a hypothetical landrace, which has been growing on a hillside, or maybe that's about example on a flood plain for a long time, there'll be maybe a little portion of the field that's raised above the water level. And so, you know, every, again, this is totally a hypothetical scenario. I'm just making up the story here. Every, you know, maybe 60 years, you've got some catastrophic floods. And once every cycle of floods, they happen to kill all the males, literally every single one. If the plant or the population did not have the intersex traits within it, then that population would just disappear with the flood. And so it's a survival mechanism that's found in large cannabis populations. And so it just goes hand in hand with landraces, but especially with landraces that have gone through periods of intense cultivation, or which are being grown according to the modern sort of breeding practices of separating males. It makes sense. That's some good context to add to it. So is there any other strange you want to talk about or get into before we wrap it up? Like, because I want to be able to point people to some specific stuff, they could check out on your site. Is there something other than what we've mentioned? Sure. Well, we talked about the sort of the easier to approach once, which again, I don't think that there's, you know, maybe necessarily a huge difference in the skill curve required. But I will say that Cronkravya. Cronkravya is the reputed to be, you know, the most potent, the strongest of all the landraces grown in territorial pylon. And it's a wonderful kind of succession. We see phenotypes that are really, really resinous with sort of fermented, sticky, sweet lemon character, which I very personally fond of. It reminds me of my experiences with cannabis from Amsterdam in the late 90s with amnesia hazes, which have this sort of insensi kind of lemon character. The best Cronkravya expresses itself along those lines. And it's very, very potent. It grows with a pretty unique bud structure, which I think will take a lot of you by surprise. If you look at it from far away, it looks like a totally normal kind of plant. You look at it close up, looks a little bit more like a mutant. The bud structure is very loose and open, and that allows for the UVs to penetrate deep inside. It's rare to find sedative narcotic cannabis in Southeast Asia due to the long growing period where the trichomes are taking a long time to ripen. We found that on the Cronkravya there's such penetration all the way in that we're seeing quite a high amount of photo oxidation. If you cut it at the right time, it's got this clear, bright, racy, cerebral high. But if you let it go all the way, which can be as long as 28 weeks, you'll definitely see a lot of really dark color trichomes and a much more narcotic sedative effect. Personally, I've really enjoyed both expressions of the Cronkravya in that regard. Otherwise, the Thai mango is like, everybody loves mango. It's such a delicious fruit. The mango expressions in Asia, whether that's Mysuru or Thai or Cambodian mango or whatever else, they range from the sort of the green, mentholated, camphor mango to the more ripe, red, juicy mangoes. People prize different things. Generally, if it's called Mamuan, which is mango in Thai, it's going more for the ripe mango spectrum as the green mango is something that's more commonly found across the board in Southeast Asia. We've seen a lot, basically. It's the red mango that's really valued and prized. As far as that goes, the lowland areas where mango traditionally was grown and selected are pretty much overrun. We are accessions in the north of the country around Chiang Mai with some smaller growers doing open pollinations in the sticks. You know, we're like 80 to 150 kilometers outside the city. One of the groups is a Hmong group in Doi in Canang, the tallest mountain in Chiang Mai. Not only is it one of the most stunningly beautiful places that if you could picture yourself smoking weed from that place in that place, it's really just heaven on earth. But the Thai mango from this terroir, due to the altitude and the cold temperatures, which is not that cold in Thailand, but a few thousand meters, a thousand feet, gets a bit nippy, comes across really purple. And so we used to, back in the day, sell that as the Thai purple mango and selling out like that every single time. So we actually just took the purple out of the name because we wanted people to try other stuff, you know? Yeah. But yeah, you probably should check out the Thai mango if that's your thing, if you like purple colors. Otherwise, we made some selections from individual black plants in Barbati Valley, namely in Iran, also in Tosh. I think Tosh is really the two to look out for, the Shoran and Goi fields. They're really high altitude fields above the Tosh Kutla. And you know, there we saw maybe like one plant in 10 showing any coloration, one plant 100 showing significant, and then one in a thousand being like pure black or dark maroon red kind of purple. And so those plants we made selections from and we separated those out. So if you're looking to Fino hunt, you know, those are going to provide you a slightly better chance than the general population, which is which one specifically is that? Well, maybe I'll just explain to you how we split up. So we got the general populations, which are from, you know, we've asked the farmers to basically mix all this. That's actually what they do by standard. They rub plants all the fields and they sit in their house and a little pile of seed accumulates below them. And we asked them just to sort through it to clean it out, etc. Sure. Those actions is either us or like members of our team or the farmers making selections, so it's like a village selection. Then that's just when we've gone there for two, three days, for example, we're going and looking for all the best plants that we can and putting the seeds aside for those apart from the general population. And then there's the single plant selections, which you'll see, or sorry, the Lyod. We need to figure out an English word for this. I don't know what it should be, man, but in French, it's Lyod. It's like the climate. It's like the plot. The plot is also a clumsy word. It's not very romantic, you know. Yeah, right. So I don't know, we need to come up with a word for that. But yeah. So the plot selections are obviously selections made from individual plots. You know, as I said before, we're encouraging the farmers to rub from individual fields and to tell their customers the name of the fields that they're rubbing from as a way to increase the value of the product. And so we're making selections from those two and then the individual plants. And so for example, it'll be like the Tosh Kutla, just the name of the village, and then Shorang, the name of the garden, and then the black selection. And so that's your single plant selection from the Goye garden in Tosh Kutla. That's awesome to make all of them available so people actually have a choice of where they're going to take it. Well, subscribers and Patreon get first dibs. So let's talk about this real quick, because I didn't even know this was a thing, and I'm going to join myself. I went and bought seeds from you before we ever spoke, because I was so stoked about this. And like the purchases from the site go to the farmers, which is super important to me. And noble as can be. And I commend you for it. But the Patreon thing, I want to join. So let's talk about some of that. So yeah, well, basically, we talked a lot about incentivizing the communities. The way to do that is to, as we said, to sell their seeds and to get them paid for it. And so given that a lot of what we do is touching on social issues, ones that deal a lot heavily with the class, with race, with the colonialism, et cetera. And given that there was a need for me as a foreigner and for a couple of other foreigners to do administrative slash communication roles, we felt that it wasn't right to take a cut out of the seed sales. And so instead, what we set up was a Patreon program and a subscription program on the website. And, you know, during the course of our work, we, you know, myself personally, when I'm traveling, I'll, you know, for example, if I'm accessing the general population, I'm going to go, go see some, go see the village and go pick up a restock on the general pop, a few others, there's going to be like, maybe along the way, some uncle who's like, oh, I got a few seeds here and there. And that stuff that we can't, it's not, because we're not in the business of doing reproductions, right? Like, yeah, yeah, we don't get seeds from the hill tribes or whatever, and then grow them out in Bangkok. No, no, no, it's directly. So we almost, you know, I mean, I have my own grow, but I have so many seeds. So we're like, okay, so we're going to get these seeds, the small quantities, the rarest stuff, and that's going to be for, for the nerds, you know, for the people who are really passionate and who want basically, you know, hand-selected seeds from, from people who are currently and actively sourcing in the traditional growing regions, you know, hand-selected point of origin seeds. And so that allows us to draw an income, which allows us to do the recruiting work to bring new, you know, groups or communities into the collective. And so it's, it's working with a lot of synergy. Yeah. Yeah, maybe we're not the best at keeping all the social media up to date, which is probably why a lot of you guys might not have heard of us until now. But we definitely, you know, we, we hold it down with the seeds. And, you know, I feel like everybody involved is satisfied with the amount of genetics that we're, that they're getting from us. We're, we're doing our best to stand by our people, you know, ultimately doing solid by the traditional indigenous land-raised communities, in some ways, takes bread out of people's mouth in the West. And so we, you know, we want to be sort of as, as, as honest and as helpful with people in the West, you know, to give them, you know, as much of a room at the table as, as we can, you know, because at the end of the day, we see this as, as a way to form new connections and new bridges between the communities in different countries. You know, we're so disconnected right now. And with integration, I think we would all benefit, right? Yeah, I would think so. I mean, that's what this is all about in the end for, for us. And that's why we started the syndicate. And yeah, I mean, it's you guys are doing your thing on the other side. And hopefully, you know, we were talking even more recently about the strain database we're building and stuff. So hopefully even we can continue to collaborate and stuff like that. Like I've asked you to help with the land-raised portion of our strain database that we're building that I'm really super stoked about. You have something accurate. And yeah, there's all kinds of fun collaborations that we can do and reach out to some of it, to some people seems like pie in the sky stuff, but I think we can accomplish a lot. I agree. It's time for, for a little bit of time to come out of the shadows a little bit. You know, particular countries like Indonesia with a rich tradition of cannabis are very, very, very oppressive. And so it's not for lack of want, you know, we, you know, people have always wanted to perform these legs and collaborate. But now the time feels right. And, you know, and so if we can, you know, help some, someone make a name for themselves by breeding the next cannabis cup winner from Fino Hunting, some land-raised gene pool they access through us, you know, that would make us happier than anything. We really, we want to lift people up on everywhere we can. Yeah. Want to sit at the table with the syndicate? Check out our Patreon and our link tree or description below. Our merch site is officially live. We have all sorts of shirts, hoodies and goodies to sort you out and shipping is super fast. And most importantly, the quality is top notch. I've been saving old designs for years for this purpose. So please check it out syndicategear.com. We also have an underground syndicate discord where we get together and solve old strain history together daily. It's an amazing community of learning away from IG and it's an amazing resource for old catalogs and knowledge. We hope you join our union of breeders and growers. Come check it out. 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