Thanks @RickSanchez, I figured as much but wanted to hear it from someone else.
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Thanks for your restraint 
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TC offers several advantages, and is used extensively in many types of plants. In bamboos for example, TC is used a lot because importing new boo strains into the US from overseas has been severely restricted for many years. The only (legal) way to import them is with a rare restricted license and then you have to quarantine them for about a year. Ramping up through division propagation would take forever with so few mother bamboo plants, so TC is used. TC is also commonly used with low numbers of imported orchid strains which are propagated for breeding. TC is also used extensively to propagate new orchid strains to supply nursery stock for the florist industry as you can make thousands of clones from one star specimen plant. Standard divisions could never produce enough plants for the florist industry.
In the case of Cannabis, growing mothers and root cuttings take up a lot of space and time, and labs can crank out TC clones in less space and with less labor. Imagine having to grow mothers just to supply cuttings for 1,000 clones four times year? It can and is done, but it is intensive. At the wholesale plant nursery I mentioned above, they did all their propagation by traditional cuttings. They had an army of Mexicans and huge fields with mother plants growing in pots, and greenhouses and hot houses for the cuttings to root in. They sized up the plants progressively from cuttings into larger pots to variable marketable size, typically one and five gallon, and shipped them in tractor trailers to landscape contractors and cities throughout the US west.
TC can be made from small stored samples, and the mother tissue can be frozen. So you do not need a constant live plant chain of mothers for TC with every strain like you do with making standard clones. This is a big problem that Humboldt growers, keeping select strains growing constantly, especially with California wildfires. So they have to grow them in several locations to ensure preservation of the strain. With TC you can go back to the freezer-library if you lose a clone chain for some reason (disaster, rip off, fire, disease, etc.). Or you can periodically skip growing strains one year and go back to them later. You can also ramp up to growing a massive numbers of plants from just a few (or even one) clones.
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Actually the one place I have the most experience directly in TC is with orchids. Lady Slippers is a rather generic term for orchids that is used for several genera. Lady Slippers refers to Cypripedium, Mexipedium, Paphiopedilum, Phragmipedium and Selenipedium orchids. In the case of Paphiopedilum, that is one genera of orchids that cannot be cloned through TC. I know this because the the guy that taught me everything that I know about Orchids in California (he worked at Rod McClellan and now owns The Orchid Zone) specialized in Paphiopedilums. I specialized in Cymbidiums myself. I had a very large collection of Cymbidiums, which are now on permanent loan in Sonoma County, California. Like with MJ stains, I specialized in heirloom strains of Cymbidiums that are virtually extinct in nurseries as florists demand the latest strains of orchids every year. As a result, once common high quality award winning orchids become extinct as people chase the latest fads. Just like with MJ (Cali-O and Big Sur Holy, as examples).
Anyway, in most (but not all) types of orchids, TC is used extensively to get the clones they want from strains that they want in huge numbers in the least amount of time to orchid resellers and florist suppliers. You can also make orchid clones from pseudobulbs and divisions of many types of orchids. In the case of Paphiopedilum, they have to be cloned by division, and thus they are more valuable and more expensive to grow commercially. But divisions with orchids (and bamboos) require a large number of mother plants, whereas TC does not.
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interesting, the local ones in the woods are Cypripedium acaule - Pink Lady Slipper. Yellow Lady Slipper is more rare but also grows around here - Cypripedium parviflorum.
I think that if you’re taking a single clone cut and hoping that is 100% identical to the mother it came from, then there is some very very small chance of genetic degradation. Some kind of odd stress or environmental factor during the cutting + rooting process and beyond could affect the replication of genes. Like maybe radiation might affect the DNA’s information and cells might function differently. I don’t know, I’m obviously not very educated about the subject. My suspicion is that a healthy clone from a healthy mother is almost impossible to fuck up. Because if you have a healthy mom, you probably don’t have any kind of weird environmental factors that could affect genetic degradation. But if you grow in some weird situation where your plants could be exposed to something that changes the way their genetic code is replicated, you probably wanna be more worried about your own health.
But like, guys like Sub LBC and others on strainly.io and wonderland nursery, these guys run huge nurseries and know their shit. And most of them use a combination of techniques. Some of them have 15+ year old mothers from seed sittin’ around, some of their moms are even older and started as clones of clones, and some of their lines are just like 20th+ generation clones. But the point is that these guys don’t keep a line around and keep selling cuts of it if the growers are getting upset with the results. Obviously these guys are doing well because the clones they sell turn out to be good flower, cycle after cycle. That consistency is what brings success. So if some kind of golden rule existed like, “after 10 years you must rejuvenate a mother or the genetics will really suck”, these guys wouldn’t be keeping around super old ass moms for use in production.
Now, I’ve also seen guys keep bonsai’d dedicated mother plants for 15+ years. And that is some next level gardening shit IMO. I saw this one guy who does this, and he actually has ONE single mother plant in a fuckin’ 1 gal square pot with over 15+ strains grafted onto it and all tagged. And he’s been keeping it alive and adding onto it for years.
Basically, looking into bonsai-based dedicated mother cloning setups, it seems like you can actually achieve consistent numbers making regular cuts for years on end. Like say 30+ 2-3" cuts every 2 weeks for many years consecutively from a plant in a 1 gal pot. The huge advantage to this is that you can literally have like 20+ mothers under one light. If you were to extrapolate this, you could–as a single individual–learn to maintain hundreds upon hundreds of genetics by yourself at home. I’m talking about keeping mothers spaced tightly together in small pots with constant root and canopy management, allowing for vertical stacking, just like a dedicated propagation shelf is used to hold hundreds of clones. This style of preserving genetics seems 2nd only to tissue culture. Which realistically is likely to become an affordable industry standard.
But one great advantage I see to chaining clones is the the flexibility in impromtu breeding. Say my buddy had some killer pollen to send my way, but all I have is a mom and a batch of fresh clones. Well, if I’m regularly chaining clones, it means I can just throw my fully veg’d mature mother into flower and be chucking pollen at her within a month. If I want to keep that dedicated mother because she is from seed and still have some fun breeding, well it looks like I gotta wait for her clones to veg up to maturity before I can throw pollen at them.
But yeah, I think chaining clones can only go wrong if you do a very small batch and get stuck with some unlikely (but theoretically possible) mutation in the plant’s genes. I am really into watching clone videos on youtube for some reason, and the guys I love the most all typically observe a practice similar to: take 100 clones, select the best 25 for flowering. So even within genetic replicas, there is variation in vigor and structure. If these guys aren’t willing to even flower with a sub-optimal clone, I doubt they’re keeping around the retarded and gangly runts for propagation purposes. With every batch of 100+ clones, they likely keep the most healthy of the cuts for becoming a new mom. Which means the selection process already protects against being stuck with a genetically degraded plant as your new mother.
Just keep in mind that I’m actually some pissant 27 yr old kid from Canada, eh. So maybe I don’t know what the fuck I’m talkin’ aboot. Because I haven’t been cloning for 40+ years like some guys. But I have been paying real close fucking attention to the guys that have. Then again, learning / regurgitating information is nowhere close to first-hand experience. So I’m just tryna say that I respect everyone’s opinions and experience here on Overgrow. If someone can tell me I’m wrong, please do, but also please provide some new information for me to replace the old stuff with. Then again, sometimes multiple things are all true and effective. So it can get muddled. But the bottom line is I’m a lifelong student and I’m here to learn.
thanks y’all
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Here, I found the guy. LightAddict. Man I love this crazy motherfucker.
And here is Sub LBC’s channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/growingforfreedom/videos
And to check out videos on Wonderland Nursery just type it in on youtube, because different channels like subcool420, Mendo Dope, Soil King, Jorge Cervantes, Emerald Cup, Cannabis Portal, and some others have all done specials / promos / tutorial pieces while filming inside of Wonderland Nursery. Plus they have their own dedicated channel which has a lot of vids: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqyGftwz74ZosRpZcourHgw
That Kevin Jodrey guy is kinda a bullshit artist, but he’s also got good info and real experience. I care about what he’s doing and respect the guy and what he has to say, but I personally wouldn’t wanna hang out with him. Don’t think our personalities would mesh.
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But that is the case with many plant species, and that is also the case (the chance that you take) with making cuttings. Many species of plants (like roses) are prone to producing sports, which are genetically different than the parent plant. Take a cutting of the sport and it is a completely different plant. Many rose varieties were made in this way, like Chicago Peace (from Peace). In the case of bamboos, they very commonly produce chimeras, which are different phenotypes and genotypes, but they can and do revert back to the original chimera, or rotate into other chimeras. Phyllostachys viviax is a typical example of that, and I have one Phy. vivax here in my nursery that has 3 chimeras in one pot from the same mother plant. One culm is even split in two with two distinct chimeras. Also a big observation in the case of bamboos is that TC does not produce as viable a plant as divisions do. They do not know why this is, but TC cuts of bamboos are less desirable than divisions. I am not aware that this is a problem with Cannabis.
Health often times has nothing to do with the generation of sports in plants. There are many factors involved, some genetic, some environmental, some due to stress, and some we have yet to figure out. Also I do not know any top growers in NorCal or here in Oregon that keep clones around for more than a year. I have never seen any of these new large indoor super size growing center grow any plants for more than one cycle either. Its grow, harvest, and toss. Its the same with the mothers and flowering plants. The long time growers that I know in NorCal regenerate their mother plants typically every 6 months or less, even the rare strains. I have run some plants and re-flowered and re-vegged for several years indoors and out in cycles, but they get woody, the stems get prone to rot, they get root bound, and they basically become hard to manage. Most everyone I know agrees that chain cloning is better.
BTW: I have been growing weed for 45 years now (not consecutively, but I planted my first beans back in 1972). I have been saving landrace and heirloom strains of Cannabis seeds and freezing them for about 40 years now. I have several degrees in engineering. I also have certificates in ornamental horticulture and silviculture. I have had 4 plant nurseries in California and Oregon, and I have been involved with several other large scale commercial plant nurseries. I have specialized in growing Cannabis, roses, orchids, bamboos, vintage grapes, cane berries, heirloom garlic, Japanese maples, and western US native trees. Not saying that I know everything either, this is just a lot of my education and experience. I have also found that a lot of stuff on YouTube is pure BS. It can me the same with forums like this one. Some good, some bad stuff is posted. An education at a university or college or a professional plant nursery is far better, IMHO. I prefer sources like Cornell, UC Davis, Oregon State, etc.
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In fact i will say the same thing that BigSur but on another plan to answer this quote lol
You’re mixing there (quote) twos dimensions of the reflexion, that can’t be united. Don’t mix productive skills and hard coded “genetic-printfoot” in this specific situation.
Rob Clarke claims that genetic drift is not real. A clone is a replica, but rather the degradation comes from taking weak cuts from unhealthy mothers. Sam Skunkman claims you can outpace the disease by taking frequent, small meristem cuts. Sorry, I don’t have a reference handy.
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