by Steven Hager
Photographs by Jeff Vaughn
THE IMPORTANCE OF SEEDS
It is Thursday, November 6. 1986 and Nevil has just returned from his daily pilgrimage to a nearby post office. It is raining lightly and a cold breeze blows off the Rhine River. Although the sun made a brief appearance early in the day, it has since been obliterated by massive, billowing clouds.
As Nevil enters his house, he is assaulted by his watchdog, Elka. He climbs the stain to his living room, flops on an old couch, and starts opening his mail. “Breeding is a matter of bending nature to your will,” he says while drawing a toke on a joint of Skunk #1. “There’s not a coffee shop in Holland that can produce better weed than this. But I don’t sell it. I give it away—or I throw it away.”
In a few short years. Nevil has made an incredible transformation from penniless junkie to wealthy entrepeneur. Although he’s an effective and efficient businessman, marijuana is his business, so things are run a bit differently around here than at most companies. For example, resinous buds of exotic types of cannabis are strewn haphazardly about the room, as are large chunks of hash and bags filled with seeds.
Nevil is a displaced Australian of Dutch heritage, and has a quiet, understated sense of humor. He lives in relative seclusion on his estate, breeding marijuana, playing pool, watching video, waiting patiently for his many cannabis experiments to bear fruit. He has his doubts about the future of the marijuana business in the Netherlands, but these doubts are likely to disappear in a whiff of smoke whenever he samples a new, successful hybrid.
“In the beginning I was quite keen for people to come here and visit me, but I found it takes large amounts of my time.” he says. “I have to sit around and smoke with them. Now it has to be someone worthwhile, someone who has a large project in mind. Most American growers are looking for the same thing: strong, overpowering, two-toke
indica with huge yields. My number one seller is Northern Lights.”
Last year Nevil supplied $500,000 worth of seeds to 15.000 American growers.
After the mail has been sorted and delivered to the in-house accountant, Nevil visits the basement to inspect his prize plants. The doors to four grow rooms are wide open, disclosing the blinding glare of dozens of sodium and halide lights. Powerful exhaust fans circulate the air, and the smell of cannabis is overpowering. Three of the rooms are devoted to young seedlings, while the largest contains 40 flowering females in their spectacular resinous glory.
It’s no secret than an explosion of indoor marijuana propagation has taken place in America: grow stores are sprouting across the nation and sodium and halide lights are selling faster than Christmas trees in December. The reason for this sudden interest in indoor growing is no secret either: for the past two years high-quality marijuana has been nearly impossible to find—unless, of course, one personally knows a grower. But any pot fanner will tell you good equipment does not guarantee a good harvest. The most important element, in fact, is good seeds. And until recently, good seeds have been as rare as a $15 lid of Colombian gold.
Thanks to Nevil, however, this sad situation has changed. Every day letters pour into his post office box, letters containing American dollars wrapped in carbon paper to avoid detection. The money is for seeds. Not ordinary pot seeds. but the best, most potent seeds on the market, seeds that will grow gargantuan buds dripping with resin, seeds that cost between $2 and $5 each.
Nevil’s seed factory has been in business for three years and it perfectly legal. The Dutch government views Nevil as a legitimate, tax-paying businessman. Seed merchants are held in esteem in Holland, and even though Nevil is something of a small fry by seed merchant standards, he is a protected national asset nonetheless. Last year his company supplied $500.000 worth of seeds to 15,000 American growers. If you smoked high-quality marijuana sometime in the last three years, chances are good the buds were grown with Nevil’s stock.
There is a big difference between growing marijuana and breeding for quality. The best-known example of the long-term effects of breeding are the
cannabis indica plants that arrived in the United States in the '70s. For hundreds of years
indica plants were bred by Afghani farmers for disease resistance, early flowering, large buds, and wide leaves. The strain was developed for hash production but it was also useful for American growers who had difficulty with sativa strains, most of which require longer growing cycles.
Ever since
indica arrived in this country, breeders have been treating hybrids that take advantage of
indica’s hardiness and
sativa’s clear, bell-like high. The results of these experiments first appeared at secret harvest festivals in California, Oregon, and Washington. Then, in the early '80s, a legendary underground organization called the Sacred Seed Company began distributing these remarkable hybrids. Nevil’s company, The Seed Bank, sells many strains originally developed by the Sacred Seed Company, including the famed Skunk #1, Early Girl, and California Orange. In the past three years, however, some of the most mindblowing strains have come out of the Pacific Northwest area: Northern Lights, University, Big Bud, and Hash Plant are adequate proof that Seattle and Portland now hold the breeding crown. Needless to say, Nevil’s Seed Bank has obtained cuttings and seeds of all these varieties and will soon be offering them for sale. Who is Nevil and how did he come to found this amazing company? As usual, the truth is wilder than anything HIGH TIMES could invent.
THE MAKING OF A SEED MERCHANT
The man who would be King of Cannabis is the son of Dutch migrants who settled in Perth, Australia, in 1954. His father worked as an instructor for telephone technicians, while his mother became a counselor for unwed mothers. They were adventurous, hardworking Catholics, and they raised their six children strictly, sending them to Catholic schools.
“I wasn’t the most malleable child,” admits Nevil. “From an early age I had an aversion to authority. I was the first-born, and I saw myself as a sort of pathbreaker for the rest of the children.” Despite his rebellious nature, Nevil was intelligent enough to jump two years ahead of his peers, a leap that resulted in his being the smallest in class. “I got beat up a lot,” he admits. “A typical day would start with the teacher calling me up in front of the class to smell my breath. ‘Yep.’ she’d say, ‘You’ve been smoking.’ And I’d get six of the best straight away. And that was just to start the day! Usually a thing like that would put me into a bad mood, so the rest of the day wasn’t much good either. It worked out I got the strap 900 times in one year, the school record.”
Nevil was not your typical juvenile delinquent. At age seven, he began raising parakeets; two years later he joined the Parakeet Society of Western Australia. “My best friend across the road got some parakeets,” he explains. “and I got extremely jealous. After he started breeding I became quite adamant I’d do the same.”
He eventually became friends with one of Australia’s leading parakeet breeders, Bob Graham. “I learned an awful lot from him,” he says. “He was a quadriplegic and he was incredibly intelligent.” Nevil learned Mendel’s laws of breeding and began charting dominant, recessive, and intermediate traits for his birds (something he would later do with cannabis plants). “I bought some of Graham’s stock and got immediate results,” he says, “When you breed parakeets, you breed to an ideal. It’s like sculpting with genes.”
When he was 15, Nevil was sent to a state school and forced to repeat his third year of high school. Consequently, he caught up with his classmates in size. “I got into a few fight,” he says with a smile, “just to get back for all the times I’d been beaten up.”
Although discipline at the school was considered harsh, it proved a cakewalk after Catholic school. “The first time I was brought before the headmaster to be punished, he made me hold out my hand and he tapped it twice with a cane,” recalls Nevil. “I thought he was just aiming. I closed my eyes and waited for the real pain, but it never came. I was quite shocked. I thought. ‘Well, now I can do anything I want.’ I ignored the dress code and dressed how I pleased. That didn’t go over well and I managed to get kicked out within three months.” He also discovered marijuana.
To be continued…