WINCHESTER, Ky. & SELMA, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GenCanna Global Inc. (“GenCanna”) and Zoë Therapeutics LLC (“Zoë”) announce a joint collaboration to deliver stable seed stock at scale to national farmers connected through GenCanna’s Certified Farming Network. This collaboration will serve to provide GenCanna’s Certified Farming Network with stable seed stock at scale so hemp farmers can continue to do what they do best — farm.
The collaboration expands the options farmers have when it comes to sourcing reliable and stable hemp seeds. Zoë Therapeutics operates a 52-acre farm, with 22,000 sq ft of fully environmentally controlled greenhouses, 21,000 sq ft fully environmentally controlled indoor facilities with an additional 12,000 sq ft of staging space, and eight acres of outdoor production for R&D and QA/QC testing prior to entering the market. Zoe’s state-of-the-art seed cleaning and sorting equipment allows the ability to process up to 10 million seeds per day. Alongside GenCanna’s best-in-class quality and safety regimes, this collaboration broadens access to reliable seeds for farmers to ensure industrial scale, high quality, and cost-effective hemp farming.
The strategic collaboration is an alignment of both ethics and values — as it advances GenCann’s mission of helping farmers farm as well as Zoë’s mission of providing access to stable seed stock for hemp farmers across the globe.
Both companies hope this message reaches farmers in Kentucky and beyond to spread the message as far as possible.
To date, GenCanna has partnered with over 60 farmers to produce more than 7,000 acres of hemp in Kentucky. In addition to its agricultural roots in Kentucky, GenCanna’s farming operations and partnerships span across the U.S. including states such as California, Oregon, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida.
Zoë understands that the entire hemp value chain starts with a seed. They conduct thorough R&D and QA/QC to ensure that they are providing reliable and consistent genetics to hemp farmers across the world. With multi-million dollar lawsuits happening around unreliable hemp seeds, Zoë helps protect farmers with their internal “pheno-hunt process” that results in high-quality seeds that are free from various contaminants that could compromise the end product.
“At Zoë Therapeutics, we put ourselves in the boots of our farmers. We want them to feel comfortable in their choice of genetics. We do this by bringing third-party verified data, transparency, and integrity to every one of our deals and all of our business practices,” said Chris Shirley, CEO of Zoë Therapeutics.
This initiative expands The GenCanna Production Platform™, a robust seed-to-scale production platform, and will help GenCanna’s Certified Farming Network develop throughout the U.S. by providing hemp farmers with feminized hemp seeds, reducing costs for farmers and helping them maximize the real estate of their farms. The team at Zoë is excited for this alliance with GenCanna due to their standardized practices, production capabilities, quality standards, and for their willingness to support farmers in these challenging times for the industry.
“Our interactions with the USDA since the release of the Interim Final Rule for Hemp Production lead us to believe that Zoe is on the best path forward for compliance with national and international standards. This forms the basis for confidence in value chain partners like lenders and processors,” said Steve Bevan, GenCanna’s President and founder of several hemp farming industry associations.
Both companies want to ensure their farmer partners have a successful season. Since GenCanna works closely with many small and medium-sized agricultural operations, these cost-saving measures will also help protect farmers from unreliable hemp seeds. This initiative will forward compliant seeds rich in cannabinoids for hemp growers for the production of food, beverage, and supplement products.
GenCanna promises to continue to help farmers farm with collaborations like this — which provide farmers with a stable solution to seed stock at scale and helps them navigate the volatile nature of a new marketplace.
About GenCanna Global, Inc.
GenCanna is a vertically integrated agriculture-technology company specializing in the production of hemp rich in CBD. Committed to helping farmers farm, the GenCanna Certified Farming Network ensures a compliant, consistent supply of hemp-derived products grown on accredited U.S. family farms. GenCanna’s seed-to-shelf chain of custody is built with the industry's strictest compliance standards (BRC, cGMP) and links the farmers directly to the finished goods.
Founded in 2014, as an inaugural member of the Kentucky Department of Agriculture's Industrial Hemp Pilot Program, the company is a longstanding industry pioneer. GenCanna works closely with state universities, consumer protection agencies, and other regulatory bodies driving key industry standards and legislation. Consistent extraction methods and innovative processing technologies ensure GenCanna production processes exceed all regulatory standards for FDA registered and inspected food production facilities (learn more at https://gencanna.com/compliance/). The GenCanna Production Platform™ assures standardized, repeatable quality from farm to finished product.
GenCanna is a founding board member of the U.S. Hemp Roundtable. Launched in early 2017, the U.S. Hemp Roundtable is a coalition of over 70 hemp companies – representing every link of the product chain, from seed to sale – and all of the industry’s major national grassroots organizations. The U.S. Hemp Roundtable has secured the passage of bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Congress that established hemp federally as an agricultural commodity, permanently removing it from regulation as a controlled substance.
About Zoë Therapeutics LLC
Zoë’s core values reside with consistency and integrity, being backed by experience and supported by a diverse staff of more than 30 employees. They are focused on producing scaled agriculture quantities of stable seed stock for hemp farmers across the globe. They pride themselves on making the extra effort to execute a proper pheno-hunt before selling seed to the public.
Zoë’s campus and current infrastructure are capable of producing 70 to 80 million seeds per year. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 acres of high quality, properly hunted, CBD, CBG, and other terpene-rich hemp varieties.
