Since 1909, J.W. Jung Seed Co., has supplied Wisconsin gardeners with seeds, plants, shrubs and trees. Two seasons ago, Richard “Dick” Zondag, president and grandson of founder John William Jung, had been introduced to hemp and worked with specialist in the industry to develop a technique of rooting female plants. This season, they offered abacus strain hemp in rooted cuttings, as well as seedlings and seeds.
Jung is headquartered in Randolph, Wis. They also have garden centers throughout Madison and in Stevens Point. (Jung Seed Genetics, suppliers of farm seed, spun off from J.W. Jung Seed in the early 2000s and is now owned by Monsanto; the two companies are not affiliated.)
Zondag says he chose the abacus strain because it’s one of the most commonly used varieties, and he found it to be an early flowering variety; ideal for our upper Midwest climate. “You need an early flowering variety for Wisconsin because our growing season is shorter than most. There’s a lot of hemp grown on the West Coast for CBD oil because they have a much longer growing season,” he says.
Focus on Females
J.W. Jung Seed’s hemp experimentation started with seedlings. They planted all of their seedling populations and then removed the male plants when they started to flower. “Then we went through the field and picked out 10 different plants that seemed to have the structure that we wanted, and the early flowering. That was a determining factor for our clones—and of course, they had to be female plants.”
They chose to focus on rooted cuttings because, Zondag explains, hemp is a dioecious plant, meaning that it has male and female flowers on separate plants. Other examples of dioecious plants include honey locust. “With hemp, you want females because the CBD oil is produced on the flowers of the hemp plant. Female flowers produce a lot more CBD oil when the flowers are not fertilized,” he says. “That’s why we use cuttings use rather than seedlings. Unless you really know what you’re doing, if you have a cutting, the plant produced from a cutting will be the same as the plant it came from.”
With seeds, you’re taking a chance of ending up with male or female plants, he affirms. All rooted cuttings sold by J.W. Jung Seed for the 2020 growing season were cloned from female plants.
Zondag says they did have some cuttings and seedlings left over after farmers completed their spring planting. “The market was becoming saturated,” he says. “The number of licenses (issued by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection) were down instead of up. I think a lot of farmers that went into hemp farming didn’t have a lab to extract the CBD oil. They got stuck with the crop and didn’t make any money. Next spring, we’re going to produce hemp cuttings by contract only.”
He hopes the market will stabilize because it’s a good secondary crop for farmers to diversify. He also sees a good opportunity to grow hemp for fiber, and for seed used in health products. “When you’re growing it for fiber, you don’t have to pay attention to whether plants are male or female. The hemp plant is very woody when it matures, so there’s a lot of fiber. It offers a lot of different purposes.”
For more information, visit jungseed.com.
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