Let me try to answer the question about feminized seeds, both traditional and Auto varieties. Well, here are some thoughts. But first, to try to give the perspective from the seed supplier, let me invite you to first grind some fine herbs, enjoy, and cast your mind back to the 80’s.
We had just started selling seeds. It was the beginning of change for the average stoner, each year more and more people started growing their own. We started selling feminized seeds in the 90’s even though a few people had said it would be impossible to do so. We soon realised that it was, for most growers the preferred choice and the more convenient way to grow. Some growers told us they felt safer growing fewer feminized seeds than they would have to if they were non-fem. Where a particular variety didn’t have feminized seeds we would get regular requests to develop them, it was very much customer driven. Over a period of time it became the norm for the overwhelming majority of growers to use feminized seeds and nothing else, it was something the other seed companies saw happening as well. For many of our older strains where we already had a system to get regular non-fem seeds from the correct parentage we continued to offer non-fem if there was a reasonable demand. For new strains we were introducing we were offering fem and non-fem seeds, but often selling hardly any of the non-fem seeds. Eventually it got to the stage where it just wasn’t worthwhile selling non-fem. It was something we had seen coming for some time.
At the same time as this transition to feminization was under way we noticed a lot of the pro-growers and our own testing indicate that for 80% of our feminized varieties the consistency of the plants produced was noticeably more uniform from feminized seed than it was from regular seed. We saw this time and time again so there was no doubt about it. Not just that, but potency was also better and more consistent. As we introduced brand new photoperiod varieties we decided just to concentrate on producing seed in feminized form and that was fully accepted by everyone, it is a decreasingly small number of people that want non-fem seeds. It made the production process simpler for us, it also meant that the customers would get better consistency and performance and hopefully want to come back to Dutch Passion when they wanted to grow their favourite variety the next time. It also gave customers more convenience as they could become self sufficient medical or recreational growers with smaller indoor grow areas which needed less energy and less plants. When we started producing AutoFem’s it was a continuation of the same approach we had used with traditional photoperiod varieties. That simply seemed the logical way to go based on our experience.
Having said that where we have historically had a good production system for regular non-fem seeds we of course continue to offer them. Somepeople like to breed their own varieties and make their own seeds. The varieties that still come with non-fem options are the older owns, specifically:
Blueberry, Mazar, Orange Bud, Power Plant,Skunk #1, White Widow, Original Durban Poison, Master Kush, Super Haze, Euphoria, Shaman, Passion#1, Purple#1 and Hollands Hope.
In order to make Auto seeds in non-fem option we would have to come up with a secondary production system, and history tells us that most people, 90%+, wouldn’t want to buy them anyway.
So I hope that makes sense to folk.
