Episode Transcript
Trevor: Kirk, we're back.
Kirk: How’s it going
Trevor: So I good, good, good. The beard is looking good and more normal and less cossacky.
Kirk: Yes its filling out
Trevor: So you know you're looking more, more, more, more like a regular human from this century. Yeah, but we are here today to talk hemp. And I know you like the hemp. We met Clayton Moore a little while ago, but I thought. I thought you would really like this?
Kirk: Episode 105, we met him in Episode 105.
Trevor: 105. Go go back and listen to that for a short bit of Clayton, but this is a whole bunch of Clayton and a whole bunch of hemp, you know everything from hempcrete to trichome. So, Kirk tell us a little bit about what you and Clayton talked about?
Kirk: well first of all, let's introduce this young man. He is all of 21 years old. He's into his final senior year at Texas A&M. He is following a family tradition which he speaks to. He's an undergraduate research student in the Industrial Hemp Breeding program. He manages Texas A&M's University's first hemp germ plasma bank. He is the president and founder of the student lead initiative called CHIL (Cannabis Hemp Innovative League).
Trevor: Which is a great acronym, by the way.
Kirk: It's a great acronym. He's a very interesting man. I swear to you that in the next five years, if our podcast is still going, he's definitely going to be going and we'll be contacting him again. This is his cannabis story. And I think he's going to be a mover and shaker in that southwest part of the Americas. Yeah. Interesting man.
Trevor: And certainly got a lot of energy and passion for the plant. So yeah, I agree I don't see why Clayton shouldn't become a world renowned expert in some part of hemp. I guess you'll have to. If he goes the PhD route, it'll be whatever that is, plus, you know, maybe a PhD with a business. So he's definitely.
Kirk: He's the going concern.
Trevor: Growing concern I like that's a good place to let us get introduced into Clayton Moore, from Texas A&M.
Clayton Moore: Howdy. My name is Clay Moore. I'm a student researcher at Texas A&M University, and I helped run an organization called “The Cannabis Hemp Innovation League,” or CHIL for short.
Kirk: And how long you been doing that?
Clayton Moore: So we've been a student organization ever since January 2022, we had our first academic semester this past year, fall 2022 and spring 2022. We had 74 active paid members. They paid their dues to be a part of our student organization and we had over 600 students in attendance over 14 meetings. We basically are all about research and academia within cannabis and hemp. Teaching the students what it's about. How they can get into the industry. We'll invite industry leaders like medical doctors or we'll invite product developers or growers or chemists for extraction to come speak at our meetings and speak to the students. We're non major specific. We'll take anyone and absolutely.
Basically, to show you that everyone has a place in this industry and we're going to do our dang best to show you that you fit right in.
Kirk: OK, before we get into CHIL, let's focus on you for a bit. You are a senior undergrad.
Clayton Moore: Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir. I'm. I'll be a senior this fall at Texas A&M University. I've been researching hemp for the past three years. Right after my freshman year down in A&M Kingsville. So yeah, that's about it. I come from Victoria, TX down South and then I'm a third generation Aggie and 8th generation Texan, so.
Kirk: So you've 8 generations Texans man that goes back a few. So, you from Texas A&M, so you are from a farming community is like you say 3 generations of Aggies.
Clayton Moore: Yes, so it's skipped my mom. I'm actually an agronomist here at Texas A&M University, and my grandfather was agronomist and his dad was an agronomist. And his dad. And so, it's skipped my mom. She actually became a lawyer and then is now a judge in Victoria. So yeah, but yeah, it goes deep.
Kirk: We'll, give her that so. did you grow up in a farm?
Clayton Moore: No, I did not. I grew up going to the farm in the summers, though we have a ranch down in Palacios, TX, but I grew up in Victoria and more of a city area and then would travel on the summers and go stay with grandma. So.
Kirk: OK. So, you're a pretty young lad. So, what got you into hemp now you're going to have to help me out here. So in Texas, it's legal for medicinal cannabis, not recreational cannabis. So, how did you get into hemp? What brought you forward and your mom's a judge, for crying out loud. How did you get into hemp?
Clayton Moore: Right, right. Well, I had a lot of friends that struggled with drug abuse and some family members that also struggled with drug abuse and that really turned my ears open to alternative medications that are a lot better than a lot of harder opioids that don't really fix any of your problems. And kind of just temporarily do the trick, but for now, because I'm in Texas, I can't just move out of the state and go to a legal market where I'd like to be for medical or recreational. I gotta stick with what I got. And so, if I can do my best and try to further the hemp industry to the point to where we might have a recreational and medical market, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And so that's kind of what sprung my idea and I think that I'm exactly where I need to be because it's in my blood.
Clayton Moore: Well, that's very cool. As a Canadian, Texas is known to be quite a conservative State. So how did Texas A&M, like I know they've got an entire school on hemp, right? So how does that happen?
Clayton Moore: Yeah. So, Texas A&M adopted an industrial hemp breeding program in about 2019. Right after the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized hemp on the federal level and whenever Texas A&M switched the gun, they really are interested in the hemp side of industrial uses such as fiber or textiles, clothing, building materials, and the grain for food production, kettle feed production, etcetera. And there's a lot of laws that you have to work around. Say like the grain production for cattle feed, they just approved a couple of new agricultural animals. You can't put it and just everything you want for all of your, for all your cattle. I mean, sorry for all of your other agricultural animals. And then the fiber side actually, Texas A&M's material science department and the engineering department just received a grant from the DOE, probably last year around $2.3 million per hempcrete printing. 3D hempcrete printing, which is pretty outstanding. That's a lot going on here in Texas with the with the hempcrete.
Kirk: DOE that's Department of Education?
Clayton Moore: Energy.
Kirk: Energy OK, so you define cannabis and hemp the same way as the rest of us do is at 0.3% THC.
Clayton Moore: Yes. So hemp will be defined under the point 3% THC range and then yes, anything over that would be considered medical or marijuana.
Kirk: Now, not without outing you here, but I think I was watching a video with you showing one of the plants you grew and there was some trichomes on there that were they indicative of hemp or was that a cannabis plant?
Clayton Moore: They're all hemp. Any videos you see? Well, it depends on where you saw this video. I have traveled a lot for our program to do some R&D and the hemp side, but all of the plants that are here on campus have to be hemp because that's only what's legalized in Texas. I'm assuming that. It is because we do have a lot of hemp plants that do show a lot of trichome production and a lot of similarities to what you would see in regular cannabis or medical or recreational cannabis. So
Kirk: I wanna just I stick with the laws for a little bit here cause we Canadians, you know, it's nice to talk to somebody from a different jurisdiction. So, is there something that individual towns or cities can opt in to having recreational cannabis?
Clayton Moore: So no, that is, that's not how it would work. It would have to work on a State by State basis here in Texas, and if either yes or no. Our medical program is pretty interesting, but it's not up to par with any of the other legal, fully legal medical states. Right now ,it's only 1% by weight of the product THC. So people are making these gummies that are about this big and helping the dose of the THC because they can't do by dosing of 10 milligrams or anything like that. Also, the only things that are allowed in Texas for medical cannabis are gummies, lozenges, and tinctures. So no flour for medical right now. And so there's a lot of people that aren't really getting into the medical side, not because they're not interested in how it's ran, but a lot of people don't agree that the current medicine that's available in our medical program really helps anyone because of the amount that is being given to the patients, so.
Kirk: OK, so let's now let's talk about your organization. It is CHIL, Cannabis, Hemp Innovation League. Tell me about that then you are, are you part of the executive.
Clayton Moore: Yes, I was. I was one of the founders of the student organization along with another student named Ian McGrath, and another student named Meredith Clay. We basically got together. We're all researchers in the industrial hemp breeding program, and we discussed with our professor about starting a student organization to educate the general public on what we're doing. And he was all for it. He signed on as our advisor, and all three of us got together, and we started this Cannabis Hemp Innovation League. And it took all summer for us to create a constitution, make sure that everyone stays happy. We're following the rules. And so basically we started up in the fall and in our first meeting, we had over 120 students in attendance, which was quite amazing. We were scared that we were gonna fill up the room and there was gonna be no seats left. But honestly, that's a great thing because we think that a lot of people should be educated on cannabis, and luckily for us, we're allowed to sign off on some projects where we can count it towards citizen science. Where we can actually bring some of our hemp plants to our meetings for the students to actually see visually and be able to like, look at the plant, look at the trichomes on the plant. Some of the hemp shows anthocyanins production. So you'll see some really purple plants, but basically we try to hit every area of the cannabis industry possible anywhere from medical recreational. You could be a chemist, biology major, engineer and we try to make sure that you know that you have a place and basically we do a lot of other things like a local Texan, who's also an A&M alumni, is named Taylor Kirk, and he actually Giddings Texas and allows us to come to his greenhouse for a for a planting day and then a harvest day for his CBD hemp varieties and his greenhouse. So it gives the students a real hands-on experience to see what it's like to actually work in the greenhouse that no other universities are currently doing right now. And we thank him greatly for that. We also are being recognized by our university that you mentioned. Texas is a very conservative state and so is Texas A&M is a very conservative school and actually we received a $4250 Scholarship to our student organization for an educational field trip to Colorado to go visit some medical facilities and extraction facilities. And just to go experience what it's like be in the city-life of Colorado. We're planning that actually right now. So, we'll be heading that way around the end of September. But we've got a lot of other cool things that we're working on. If we're talking about laws still. We support this coalition that was created not too long to call long ago called the College Station decriminalization or CSATDecrim for short. Basically, it's a coalition of student organizations that are working together to decriminalize cannabis in College Station to protect the residents and the students, future careers and passions, and endeavors for a small possession charge that could potentially take away opportunities that they would never receive if they found out that they had that charge on their on their past so. We've got a lot of great stuff so.
Kirk: So yeah, I know. It sounds very interesting. So talk to me a little bit about Texas A&M. And now Trevor down in Florida met you and your team of professors. So is Texas A&M actually got fields of hemp that you guys are growing and checking out?
Clayton Moore: Yes, currently we have 3 plots out at the farm right now, right next to the corn, the cotton, the sorghum, you name it. We've got it out there. We're doing different projects right now. Trevor got to meet my boss, Dr. Russell Jessop, who runs the industrial and breeding program. And he also got to meet Dr. David Baltenspergerwho is our department head of the agricultural Soil and Crop Science Department. And then you also get to meet me. And I'm just a student researcher in this program, but got to talk a little bit about the science that's going on behind it. We have four graduate students and four undergraduate students in our program, right now. It only started off with me and another graduate student at the very beginning of fall 2021. But basically, now that we're up there, we have a graduate student that is working on inbred lines, so if you. ever look at a row of cotton or corn, you know, it's genetically uniform, it grows straight across. You know, if you plant out hemp or cannabis by seed, you're going to get a bunch of variation in size and yield and everything. Well, with inbred lines we're working on trying to create a uniform hemp crop or both grain, fiber and multi-use crops. So, if you're interested in doing just fiber for materials and textiles and building materials, you can select that variety. If you're interested in just grain for cattle feed production or grain oil extraction, you can pick that or the multi-use, you can do both. And so we've got that going on. We've also got another graduate student who's working on Tetraploids and Triploids. So basically, you and I, we have two sets of chromosomes. We're diploids and regular cannabis plants and hemp plants are diploid. Well, if you double the chromosomes of a regular plant and you cross, if you double the chromosomes of the diploid, you get a Tetra. And if you breed a diploid and a tetraploid together, you can get a triploid, meaning sterile hemp, just like ligers and mules, they won't produce seed. So you can have a seedless crop. If you if we can create these triploids and make sure that it stays uniform. Then we have another student that's doing fiber research. He's making bio-composites plastics and other building materials, and then we have another student who's working on heat and drought tolerance genes and hemp because you, as you know, Texas gets very, very hot. Right now, it's 104 degrees outside as we speak. Very, very hot. And then we have four other undergraduates, me, I run this program called the Hemp Conversion Program, where I reach out to breeders, growers all around the world within the 30 degrees north latitude and at 30 degrees south latitude to find southern coastal adapted hemp to make crosses and increase germplasm here in America. It was granted a $200,000 grant from USDA ARS increase hemp germplasm in the United States of America. There's a list that was approved of over 100 different varieties from the USDA and really only 8 to 12 of them are commercially available that farmers actually know how to source them, and everyone seems to be growing a lot of the same strains, and there's not any new development going on that's hitting the mast skill. So this project is basically to increase the germ plasm and diversify what farmers can choose to grow on their own fields, and then we'll move on to Ian McGrath, who's working on Organic Terpenes based pesticide. So we're extracting terpenes directly from cannabis and hemp and taking the pure isolates and forming an organic pesticide. So, you know, Roundup has a lot of different chemicals in it like glyphosate, it can be cancer, cancer. Yeah sorry carcinogens and basically, he's making an all-organic terpene based pesticide that is just terpenes and some other oils. I can't go in depth on what those are because that's IP currently, but we're using that as a better alternative than what's currently on the market. And then we have Meredith Clay, who's doing a lot of trichome research and a lot of propagation methods like cloning and petal cloning, and other sorts of things. They're trying to basically develop an app that can look at a trichome and tell you exactly what stage your plant is at. Basically, the app will be on your phone, and there's a little microscope attachment. You put it right up to your plant and it'll take a landscape image of that leaf material with the trichomes on it and it will tell you at what percent you're at. Amber, what percent you're at cloudy and what percent you're at clear. Basically, if you're not familiar, the trichomes have three different stages and clear means no cannabinoids. Cloudy means cannabinoids, and amber means deteriorating cannabinoids. So it'll let you know your percent yield of amber trichomes to help you with your harvest. And then we have Chris, we have a new student who's doing a lot of new research. That's not out for public talk yet. But other than that, that's kind of what our program is doing currently and we have a lot of plants out in the field, so.
Kirk: Well, that's amazing. So now you did say cannabis and hemp, so you're growing cannabis like marijuana and hemp, are you categorizing just hemp?
Clayton Moore: Sorry, just categorizing just hemp. Under the 0.3% sorry for the confusion.
Kirk: OK. All right. No, no, no worries. No worries. OK, so that's a lot of hemp. So is Texas A&M growing all your own crops for this research?
Clayton Moore: We're growing all of our crops. We're not really. I don't think we're allowed to 3rd party do any research with other facilities. We are allowed to help other facilities that do want to do their own R&D to give them like some word what we found in our own programming things. But we're not allowed to do any outside hemp research. With other third parties, yet. We're lucky enough us another university was awarded a research facilities license, which is a little different than a regular hemp growers license. Hemp producers license. Basically, we are allowed to do the breeding. We're allowed to do all this extra research with our hemp crops, unlike hemp producers. They have to just grow the product, create a product, sell the product. But with us, we actually can do a lot more R&D than other people can. So we're getting a load of work put on our plates because.
Kirk: No kidding. So. So how big are your fields?
Clayton Moore: Our fields are usually they're about. They stay under an acre per project. They're we don't go over an acre on our projects just because we're doing mass selections of different diverse genetics. So one plot will have probably like 40 different varieties in that one plot. It's not like we're growing out fields and fields of just one variety just yet, because we're in the development stage of selecting varieties that are going to be good in Texas or Southern coastal plains basically.
Kirk: So one so one acre will have several experiments going on in one acre.
Clayton Moore: Oh no, sorry. Usually, it's one plot will indicate 1 research project.
Kirk: And that's an acre.
Clayton Moore: Yeah, yeah, basically. We'll stay under an acre, that one project and then we'll go find somewhere else to do another project. And we like to space it out. We like to space it out just because you might be growing a feminized line. But your feminized line could also hermaphrodite, and you can have male pollen sex pop up. And you really don't wanna mix this project over here that is going to be a feminized only trial and you're going to have a trial over here that's going to be a regular trial. They're gonna have males and females pop up and you don't want cross pollination going on so.
Kirk: Right. No, that that would be important. So I would imagine all the stuffs harvested by hand, yeah.
Clayton Moore: Yes, currently we don't have any farm equipment or any machines that will come through and chop off we've talked with a couple other universities that do have some really cool machinery that can come in and say you're going for a fiber type or a use. Basically, if you're sorry if you're going for a dual use, it's usually the bush on top that has all of your grain and seed, and then under will be about like 3 to 4 feet of hemp fiber just the stock and so they have these machines that can come through and cut off the top. They'll harvest all the grain and then they'll come back around again and cut the bottoms and harvest all the fiber, and so there's some really cool stuff going on like that. But really, yes, it's we harvest and then we thrush with our own hands. Get all sticky from the trichomes that are on them and the resin, things like that so.
Kirk: Well, that's really cool. So I guess as a citizen of Texas, if I'm traveling down the highway and I look across us does it say hemp, like how do you how do you keep people away from your hemp crop.
Clayton Moore: So, our so I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about location. I mean we only have one research field, but we like to keep it protected by not putting it right next to the street. So that people that are dropping on that highway.
Kirk: OK, that makes sense.
Clayton Moore: They'll just drive in and see it. But yeah, and then we'll.
Kirk: That makes sense. I live in Dauphin. We live in a hemp producing area. We've been producing hemp in Dauphin for about 25 years, so you can travel down the highway and there'll be a big field of hemp, but everybody around here realizes that, you know, go ahead and smoke that if you want to. You're just going to get yourself a headache. So it's all. It's all for grains. It's all for grains and a little bit for fiber.
Clayton Moore: Exactly. And there's a couple of places In Texas, where people will have hemp varieties that are being grown on their property that are close to highways and roads and things like that, but A&M specifically, we hide it all because like you had said, if someone came in and stole it. Yeah, go ahead and smoke it. It's gonna. It's not gonna do what you think it's gonna do, but really, it's that's affecting our research and whatever project we're doing. So it's a lot bigger than just like just bigger than someone stealing it just to get high or something like that. You're affecting like a project that was heavily funded, so we like to make sure our fields are a little more secure than being right up next to the roads, but a lot of other people are just growing for fiber and grain types can be right up next to the road. I've I think I've driven through Matagorda, which is kind of around where our ranch is, and there's some fields out there that have hemp in them that you could see directly from the road so.
Kirk: OK, so so as a farmer of hemp and you've been doing it now for about 2 1/2 years.
Clayton Moore: Three years, yeah.
Kirk: Three years. So what is your biggest learning. I'm not talking about the science. I'm not talking about the CBD but farming hemp, what's your biggest learning?
Clayton Moore: Do your do your due diligence before you just jump in. A lot of I'm glad that I got to start with the university and not just start on my own because a lot of farmers started on their own whenever federal legalization came around and Texas was OK with it and they jumped right into it. They said Oh man, I'm gonna grow this crop and going to make tons and tons and tons of money, because they were in the mindset that what they were growing was the same thing as recreational or medical cannabis versus hemp, which is gonna be under your psychoactive level, 0.3% THC. And so they're like, I'm gonna grow this and this is gonna sell like crazy. Well, what had happened was there was farmers that started growing their hemp and they ended up having hemp stored away rutting away and getting mold in their barns for over three years and had no one to send it to . So really do your due diligence before you do anything, you know, find a buyer, get a contract, do all this other stuff. I know that hemp is not as easy as any other agricultural crop to get into, not only because of the laws and regulations and the supply chain of getting the product to the customer, but also the plant itself is really finicky. You can't really spray much on it without killing it. You can't they do the same agricultural practices that you can with other crops on it. It's just it's a whole new playing field, basically. And Texas is learning just as just as much as we can. But there's been other States and countries like Canada that have been further ahead of us in this game. So, we're playing catch up, right now so.
Kirk: My understanding of harvesting hemp is that you need specialized equipment, one of the biggest problems that when the American farmer decided to plant acres and acres of hemp was that they didn't know how to cut it down because they just basically their equipment wasn't appropriate. And then once they cut it down, it just started composting in the fields.
Clayton Moore: Yeah, right. Right. It's a real Hardy plant. It's not like you have 8 acres of hemp that you just planted. You're not going to go with a bunch of scissors and just go chop it all for 8 acres. You need the right equipment, but some some equipment like we've even noticed say we were till tilling a field or something like that with a with a push tiller or something. We've clogged up our tiller before with like hemp fibers and it's like stopped. It's actually stopped our tiller before. And so like you need some pretty good equipment. That what Texas just doesn't have right now. Currently there's a couple of other states that have created some equipment that are really great for it, that Texas has been renting out or borrowing and things like that. But yeah, like you said, the technology needs to be there to be able to harvest acres and acres and acres of hemp, which I don't think it's at yet so.
Kirk: I find it very cool you guys are really focusing on genetics around your region. So the genetics that we're growing up in Canada wouldn't be relevant to your research.
Clayton Moore: No, you're stuff would just, you know.
Kirk: Sure. Fair enough.
Clayton Moore: Yeah. We're so basically my professor before he got into hemp research, he was a perennial grass breeder. And so there was a there was a gene that they call stay green in grasses and basically it can go, you know, weeks without water and it'll just stay green forever. And so basically what we're trying to do is breed in hemp that stay green gene, so that it'll just it. It won't have to absorb as much water. It won't need as much water as it usually it does, and it'll just stays green for as long as it can. Because in Texas we go through severe droughts without rain for, I t could be all summer. I remember last summer it was just awful with the rain. We didn't have any rain whatsoever and we had to irrigate all of our plots every other day. Basically it seemed but that's one of the things we're looking for is that heat and drought tolerance. So not only the the heat from outside, but the that drought and stay green jeans, so.
Kirk: How do you how Do you find the soil. Does cannabis need special soil. Once you've harvested the cannabis? Have you tested the soil? Does it improve the soil?
Clayton Moore: So nothing too interesting on the improving the soil part, it doesn't have lagoons. So it's not really nitrogen fixing or anything like that. But I have read some studies that tiling your hemp waste back into the soil can be good for nitrogen fixation in some sort of way as well, but one thing we've noticed is that right here where we're at in College Station is very heavy clay pan and the hemp does not particularly like that heavy clay plan. Hemp likes more permeable like sandy silt soils versus heavy clay soils. So all of the plants that we grow in our facility and in our greenhouses on campus, we usually use a really permeable sandy cocoa core mix of some and then the further south you go in Texas towards the coast, you'll get more sandier soils like where my farm is it's very sandy, it's very sandy and hemp thrives there basically in the Matagorda area of Texas. But but we're at currently with the soil it's having a hard time just breaking the surface with that heavy clay, so yeah.
Kirk: So. So where are you going to be, I don't know, let's say 6 to 10 years from now, you're going to be. You're a young man now, so you're going to be in your 30s ten years from now. What? What are you going to be doing with this.
Clayton Moore: So I have a I have a couple of wants this next so this fall actually December I submit an application to a molecular environmental plant sciences. I'm applying for my PhD here at Texas A&M so that I can continue my Cannabis research and hopefully one of these days I want to own my own business and potentially grow in the recreational or medical markets. That is as a director of cultivation or director of operations because growing isn't the only thing that excites me. I get excited about extraction procedures as well terpenes or cannabinoids or anything of that sort. So really owning my own business would be a really big thing, especially in Texas. If Texas legalizes recreational and medical, which I believe they will, it's only a matter of time before all of the United States legalizes, in my opinion. But whenever they do, that's where I'll be right here in Texas, hopefully having my own business. So.
Kirk: That's very cool, man. I got a few more, more minutes with you. Is there a question I didn't ask? Is there something you wanted to, other information you want to share?
Clayton Moore: I am a scientific writer for a published magazine here in Texas called the Texas Hemp Report. And that's ran by Russell Dowden and he's got a really cool podcast as well that took the same reporter and he basically helps all of these businesses that are starting up here in Texas and businesses. That are already doing really well. They like to buy advertisement space on this magazine and I get to write really cool articles for those people. And also just give updates on what we've learned at Texas A&M, so people who have a subscription to that magazine can flip through and say, Oh my goodness, this is what A&M's doing. Oh my goodness, this is what CHIL is doing? This is what's happening in Texas. There's these products. There's these hemp fibers that you can buy for this clothing line. You know, things, things and those sorts. So that's another thing that I that I do. The Cannabis Innovation League gave away over $5000 in scholarships for our students so that we're proving to you that it's not just some you know club for just students who want to have, you know, a good time learning about cannabis or hemp. It's really like an academic standard that we're setting in this cannabis industry. And basically we had two scholarships this past semester that we gave away, one from pure ISO labs here in Texas based out of Bernie, Texas. And it was for $1000. To create your own product based out of CBD or a fiber line of some sorts or grain type. And then we also created a Texas Hemp Scholarship that any university in Texas can apply for. It's $2000 and it's how can we destigmatize here? I'll read the topic. It is how to destigmatize cannabis in the eyes of academia, professionals, industry professionals and the general public. Basically we had a student win. His article got posted in this magazine and we're being sought after for helping with that. Destigmatize of cannabis and in Texas, so.
Kirk: Ohh, that's very cool man, it sounds like we'll be talking to you in a few more years as you get yourself situated in the industry. I wish you luck and I thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Clayton Moore: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Kirk.
Trevor: Kirk, I really like Clayton. When I met him in person, he is, he really is an enthusiastic young man. Obviously intelligent young man. But and this was the cool part about you having the longer interview you know, people in his sphere doing everything. See if I can get some of these right: Everything from a coalition to decriminalize cannabis on campus. So, you know if you had a charge for a small possession, you know that not to ruin the rest of your life to, you know, some of his research associates doing stuff that I'll pretend I understand. Mixing diploid and diploid to get a tetraploid and then a diploid and tetraploid to get triploid. Anyway, to basically get a sterile mule like cannabis plant seeds. Heat and drought resistance. One that I really thought was cool. Terpene based organic pesticides, which sounded like it was a little bit under hush. Hush exactly what they were doing, but Oh, and 3D printing hempcrete. There was a lot going on in that interview.
Kirk: Yeah, there is. There is a lot going on. I was thinking about that early meme in the cannabis sphere of the Internet. There's a picture of the hemp plant in the middle and all the sort of spokes from a tire going out. What you can do with hemp, it's almost as if the University of Texas A&M, if they just took that meme, put it up in the wall and said which student wants fiber. Which student wants this one. It's because it was like going through a tick box and I actually in my notes, I have a tick box. Oh, they're doing that with hemp tick. They're doing that with hemp. Tick. What I found most interesting is that we're no strangers to hemp. There are several hemp related episodes within our library and many of the things they're doing down in that university, we have fellow down the street here at hemp sense that we interviewed that he's doing a lot of this stuff. But what? What? What triggered me was that Clayton's working on a breed a germ from that area of the world that will grow. So it's almost like he's going to create his own land race of plants that do well in the Texas environment. I find that fascinating. So he's, I guess they're getting into manipulating the plant, so it grows in their area and then they can do with what they want it's. It's sort of kind of like big business in hemp.
Trevor: Right. Yeah. Well, and it makes sense. This is what plant breeders have done. Like you said, you know, the sorghum, the corn, the wheat, you know, this is what you do. Is you get a variety that grows well in your area and produces what you want. You know you want a wheat plant that is relatively short but has a whole bunch of seeds in the seed head. Because I always get that wrong. Whether that's a seed or a grain, but I think it's still seed and I'm sorry farmers when I keep saying it wrong. But yeah this is what plant breeders do and this is what Texas A&M has been doing forever, so it is very cool that they're sort of turning their expertise on to on to hemp.
Kirk: Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to this young man. He's definitely going to be a going concern. I'm excited for him. I hope you know it's almost like it's almost like we should just do a yearly update on what he's doing. he's a busy fella.
Kirk: He is, like I said, he's fun to talk to, lots of energy.
Kirk: So I'm Kirk Nyquist, I'm the registered nurse and.
Trevor: Trevor Shewfelt. I'm the pharmacist.
Kirk: We are Reefer Medness - the Podcast and what if you listen to us. This is really disorganized? If you're listening to our podcast, go to Refermed.ca, check out our website. All the research that we have on our guests is all there and rate us on that platform you're listening to us on. If you're listening on iTunes rate us on iTunes or Spotify. Give us a rating. Tell a friend. Oh, I know what I was going to tell you.
Trevor: Tell me something.
Kirk: Instagram. Instagram told us that we can't. We won't be shared by them. Our content.
Trevor: What does that mean?
Kirk: They won't have us arbitrarily come up on reel. So all those, all those videos I'm doing are not going to be passed on on reels. They don't like our content. And when I posted that other people in our sphere have had the same problem. So, I think what we need to do is that people need to share our posts so their friends can find us. That's my point. We're truly you know, tell two friends and they'll tell two friends. Oh, yeah, go to our YouTube page and you can see the things that Instagram's not not sharing bad bad bad Instagram.
Trevor: Bad, bad Instagram. OK, well. Kirk was another good one. We will catch up with everybody later.