2024 Cannabis Seed Market Overview

Cannabis Seed Costs: From Cheap Bulk Feminized Seeds to High Potency F1’s

With the widespread legalization of cannabis across the country, considerable attention has been directed towards the evolving wholesale and retail pricing dynamics of cannabis seeds. While the prices are experiencing a downward trend, the extent of this decline and the eventual stabilisation of wholesale and retail prices are subjects of ongoing discussion. Notably, in the U.S. and Europe, the seed market has historically been dominated by a small number of large companies, commonly known as seed banks, which have addressed challenges related to payment processing and risk mitigation.

Expansion of Seed Providers: Quantity vs. Quality

The barriers to entry posed by the federal illegality of cannabis products have deterred genuine breeders and newcomers from participating in the market. However, the circulation of the DEA memo, effectively decriminalising cannabis seed sales, has led to a surge of new entrants, causing a significant slowdown in sales for many seed banks, often up to 30% or more. This influx has brought into focus the critical considerations of both quality and price, as market compression in a previously unregulated market often does.

Concurrently, existing legacy seed banks listing 300 SKU’s or more are already faced with a challenging supply in demand matrix, creating a stagnant culture of cannabis stock, made from replicating old lots or any many cases filling classic website SKUS with the most approximate replacement. So while many banks and company boast a vast variety and quantity of seed SKUs they carry, quality is lost along the way as the operational complexity of maintaining that many SKUs outweighs the benefit in delivering accurate representations of each SKU.

Challenges in Sourcing Quality Seeds for Seed Banks

Seed banks have adopted diverse approaches to seed sourcing, including carrying multiple brands or breeders, as well as white labeling and exclusively selling seeds under their own in-house brand. While they have endeavoured to drive down wholesale or white label seed prices, retail prices have remained relatively stable. Many seed banks have imposed stringent criteria for seed sourcing, emphasising two primary factors: robust germination and cost-effectiveness. However, by concentrating solely on these aspects, they risk overlooking other crucial elements.

Acquiring Cheap Bulk Seeds vs. Delivering High-Quality Cannabis Seeds

Replication: Open Pollinated Production for Cheap Bulk Cannabis Seed

The pursuit of cheap bulk cannabis seeds often leads to the acquisition of products that have been produced with minimal investment in breeding efforts, resulting in inconsistent and unpredictable outcomes. This approach essentially entails seed replication, characterised by simple open pollinated crosses and the selection and cloning of winning plants. Consequently, the resulting seeds exhibit significant heterozygosity and variability. In some instances of low-cost seed production, seed plants are utilised to generate additional seeds without the incorporation of clones, amplifying variation and unpredictability.

High-Quality Seed Production: Utilisation of Clones and Emphasis on Uniformity

When clones are utilised in seed production as with our process at Atlas Seed, the resulting seeds possess an exact 50% genetic composition from each parental genome. In contrast, a reliance on seeds introduces greater variability. Achieving consistent and uniform seed quality demands extensive time, often spanning several years, and requires expertise at each stage of the process. At Atlas our parental lines undergo lab analysis, inbreeding, backcrossing, and further breeding to isolate desirable traits and eliminate undesirable ones. Thus the benefit of choosing an independent cannabis breeder for your cannabis seed sourcing.

These inbred lines (IBLs) are then crossed in specific ways to generate stable F1 hybrids through modern agricultural breeding practices. Once the IBL is established, ongoing investment is necessary for its maintenance, often involving tissue culture or effective preservation in a breeder’s library. Furthermore, the production of high-quality, reliable cannabis seeds necessitates proprietary techniques that significantly differentiate them from cheap bulk cannabis seeds in straightforward albeit lower quality, open pollinated seed runs.

Comparative Costs of F1 Hybrids vs. Open Pollinated Vegetable Seed

An illuminating comparison from the vegetable seed industry underscores the significance of the cost disparity between open pollinated and F1 hybrids. For instance, in a well-established market, the price of cucumber seed, particularly F1 hybrids, can be remarkably high, reaching up to $1.31 per seed and typically ranging from $0.20 to $0.60 per seed. In contrast, the marketmore cucumber, a traditional and open pollinated favorite, costs approximately $0.0055 per seed. This means that hybrid cucumber seed is approximately 55 times more expensive on average than open pollinated seed.

Atlas Seed: High Quality, High Potency Cannabis Seed Lots for Precision Ag

Our breeding, trialing, and production process at Atlas Seed has been developed and iterated over many years of invested time and energy honing in operational processes, developing IP for priority genetic development, and implementing critical oversight from top level PHD plant breeding and cannabis agricultural consulting sources, in addition to numerous hurdles and road blocks being overcome in a trial by fire, design and check learning process.

The results are an ever growing genetic cannabis library that we’ve put the work into to ensure our plants perform for licensed cultivators and legal commercial operators at scale. We’ve seen our genetics again and again provide real market solutions to farmers facing agricultural challenges in adverse climates on 4 continents. If you want to succeed at a small or large scale alike, be sure you are seeking out independent breeders for you seed lots and are not simply sourcing cheap bulk cannabis seeds from a marketing platform.

If you’re interested in starting a wholesale account with us, please get in touch by filling out a wholesale application.

Atlas Seed’s Current 2024 Catalog: F1’s made from Clones with Inbred Lines

Q & A on Cannabis Seed Market Overview

Understanding the purpose of sourcing high quality, high potency cannabis genetics bred for peformance.

Q:What’s the difference between cheap bulk cannabis seeds, ie open pollinated genetics that have been replicated cheaply vs high performance f1 hybrid cannabis genetics bred and produced for precision agriculture?

A: While cheap bulk lots have been produced in a haphazard way from multiple donors, targets, and without any lab testing, intuitive oversight, or performance selection for the purpose of merely filling an old SKU on a website, performance f1 hybrid cannabis genetics are produced from inbred parental lines, from clone, and have been hand selected and tested by both lab equipment, a breeders eye, and large scale field pheno testing, ensuring that the resulting cannabis seeds lots are uniform, vigorous, and stable.

Q: Can I source high quality, high potency performance cannabis genetics and cheap bulk cannabis seeds at the same time?

A: This is perhaps a question of relative semantics, but theoretically, yes, if you work directly with an elite cannabis genetics breeder like Atlas Seed then you will most certainly receive high potency, feminized f1 hybrid cannabis lots that perform and display vigor, uniformity, and excellent yields; and, are affordable / cheap cannabis seeds, for both farmers and home growers alike.

Q: What’s the best source for high quality, cheap, bulk cannabis seeds?

A: Generally speaking US (United States) independent cannabis breeders are considered some of the best sources in the world for high quality, cheap bulk cannabis seeds, especially breeders from California, where they have had decades of developing genetics in the Emerald triangle, and almost 10 years of legal cannabis operations, far ahead of most any other state in the United States next to Colorado and Oregon.