Comment by steve_adams_86

Comment by steve_adams_86 3 days ago

2 replies

I'm slowly building a business which produces and sells plant tissue cultures. I have many years to go before I can do it full time, but that's the goal in around 5 years. One of the big challenges is scaling up. This work is fairly labour intensive once you've got several batches on the go, and different species and protocols lead to different timelines and so on. There's always something to do. At some point, assuming things pick up, I'll have to go all in on the business. That'll be scary. There'll be an extremely busy liminal zone in which I have a full time job and thousands of cultures to manage. The margins aren't incredible, so it'll be a slog with fairly limited rewards. However, once I get past that zone and can leverage economies of scale and more safely invest more in the business, it should get quite a bit easier. Here's hoping. The risk and sweat equity factor is truly not appreciated if you haven't done it before.

dv_dt 3 days ago

That frankly sounds fascinating & amazing. Are the cultures used for grafting onto plants or something else entirely? I had an aunt that used to grow specialty crops and they were always rotating the varieties and raising different seedlings to see what they would like grow next.

  • steve_adams_86 3 days ago

    It’s very fascinating and totally amazing! I almost exclusively grow terrarium and aquarium plants for hobbyists at this point, with a few businesses buying small allotments. As I expand what I can offer and gain more traction it should allow the business to grow a bit, slowly but surely.

    The terrarium plants get acclimated in 2” pots. Aquarium plants go straight out in vitro.

    I’ve got some blueberries on the go as an experiment because I know a farmer who would like to buy them, and that could be a future avenue to do higher volume. But at this point I’d prefer to stay away from agriculture if I can. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t really keep me ticking like the others do.