Thankyou. I truly believe that people should never be afraid to say 'I don't know' because no-one knows everything and the moment someone starts to think they do know it all they have fallen into a dangerous trap. I try to learn a little each day, always found a lot of satisfaction in gathering new knowledge and gaining new perspectives on existing knowledge.
I don't know if feminised seeds are a bad thing or not. There is a very bad movement towards feminised seeds going on in the commercial seed industry, seems a new seed company offering fem seeds appears every week almost, and that is a bad thing because they are almost exclusively just jumping on the bandwagon to make a quick buck. What sticks in my throat about it is they are mostly just taking other people's work and producing their own quick n dirty hacks of it to turn easy profits. Look how many of the femmed lines you can buy are just S1s of cuts selected from Mr Nice lines, two examples off the top of my head are 'Critical Plus' by Dinafem - an S1 of the 'Bilbo' cutting of Mr Nice Critical Mass, also 'Shining Silver Haze' an S1 of a SSH cut. In almost any other industry this would not be allowed and Shanti would be able to take legal action to protect his work, but sadly the cannabis see industry is not regulated in any way so people are able to steal at will.
All that said, I do think that the feminising process itself is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be a useful tool in the breeder's arsenal and can be used to do some interesting work, for example, you could self a cutting in order to be able to grow out a number of S1s purely to get a peek into the genetics in terms of the variation and traits that are dominant and recessive. I used to have an exceptionally pretty Purple Afghan female, this plant was the most intensely bright purple, more magenta really. I wanted to know if it was true breeding for it's purple colouration, if it would pass on it's colour to it's offspring. I made a few crosses of it to various males and growing out those F1 seeds gave me some insight into the mother's genes. I wish I'd made S1s of her too because that would have given me a different perspective on her genetic makeup without any genes from a different line to consider.
What I'm getting at is that feminising a plant is a useful tool. It is completely irrational to hate the tool because it can be put to bad use, it would be like hating screwdrivers because they can be used to stab and hurt people. Don't hate on the tool, hate on the folks who use it with bad intentions and let the people who will use it in a productive way do so without the burden of hatred.
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