Although cloning still rules the cannabis industry, tissue culture cannabis propagation offers five absolutely enormous advantages.

Tissue Culture Cannabis Production Advantages

1. Compact operations—Even as medical and recreational cannabis legalization continue to become the norm, most locales have fairly strict production and handling regulations–which often essentially mandate indoor grow operations.  Space is at a premium. And a cutting-based cloning operation can take a warehouse all by itself.  But a comparable tissue culture cannabis lab will produce the same number of plants in 1/10th the space.  A tissue culture lab half the size of an average McDonalds can produce as many plants as a warehouse of clones and mothers.
2. Efficiency—Tissue culture produces far more starter plants than cloning in a far smaller space.  More importantly, where-as cuttings demand perpetual maintenance—forcing you to work on the plant’s schedule—tissue cultures can be held in “suspended animation” indefinitely.
3. Profitability—Although a tissue culture cannabis operation costs about 75 percent more to set up, it’s roughly 36 times more productive (in terms of plant yield per square foot)–and readily scales up with more labor in the same space.  (In general, it’s much easier to higher more workers than to move your entire operation to a larger site.)
4. Reliable genetics—Every grower knows that “clones” aren’t true clones of their mother. Mutations are always an issue, as is genetic drift.  A tissue culture operation produces a truly genetically identical plant every time.
5. Healthier plants—Cloning operations have to do perpetual battle with diseases, pests, infections, molds, and fungi.  All of these easily pass from mother to clone.  Tissue culture is a sterile operation: explants cannot pass disease to their offspring, and the tissue culture cannabis samples are isolated from each other in aseptic nutrient media.