dantheclammanTobacco plant altered to produce five psychedelic drugs
givesomefucksI don’t know what scale would be required…
But absolutely wild they’re starting with one of the most labor intensive crops.
Tomatoes are the same family, and waaaaay easier to grow at scale. Seems like it would have been an obvious choice.
But if an acre is an annual supply, it doesn’t matter.
They used an Australian wild tobacco that is widely used in genetic research. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotiana_benthamiana
Still tho…
I grew up on a tobacco farm, hardly any aspect is mechanized.
To harvest it:
Put a six foot stick in the ground
Put a metal spear tip on top.
Cut plant with hatchet
Impale on stick
After like 6-8 plants, start a new stick.
Then after a couple weeks load it on a wagon by hand, then hang it in a tobacco barn (aka death trap) where you’re a couple stories high doing the splits, and people pass the sticks up to you and you hang and spread them to dry.
Months later you climb back up and bring it all down.
Then manually remove each and every single leaf.
Grade it.
And compress it into bales using hydraulic jacks.
For tomatoes:
Drive a tractor over the field
Dump tomatoes
Like…
I’m just saying if we need a lot, this is t the means for production. If it’s just testing and it’ll end up somewhere else, no worries.
I appreciate when people have RL experience in a niche topic. Best part of online discussions, thank you for the insight!