What is your favorite part of going to a fair? For me, I love going for the food and the communal atmosphere of celebration. There is something infectious in the air as hundreds or thousands of people gather. I recently attended the 2016 THC Fair in Redmond Oregon and felt the infectious excitement of people coming out of the shadows, many for the first time in their lives.

As the first year of recreation cannabis sales in Oregon, the turnout was significantly greater than the last 7 years of the Hemp and Cannabis Fair.  The vendors filled the room with the sights and smells of canna-culture. The tables were decorated with everything from soil to blunt wraps and of course, loaded with cannabis. People lined up quickly to spin wheels for prizes and compete in the joint rolling competition. Even I couldn’t help but get caught up in the spirit of the event and attempted to roll my first joint in over a decade. My efforts ended in frustration as I laughed at my own ineptness with a paper. My wife stepped in and did a sight better than me.

I touched in with as many booths as I could and asked a simple question: what are you trying to get out to the community? Their responses ranged the gambit from simply money to a genuine desire to serve the community. Today I would like to focus on the Laboratory testing facilities that were present this last weekend.

My first stop was on Green Leaf Labs booth.  This laboratory has been in operation since 2011. They have continued to invest in state of the art potency testing equipment to provide their clients with the best possible. Elaine Miller explained to me that her lab provides diverse testing throughout the state of Oregon. With a 4-5 day turnaround, no currier fee, and the ability to test at the farm or pick up samples for testing back at the lab, Green Leaf Labs is a great solution for farmers looking to sell their product to a dispensary or other licensed distributors.

I ended up making several stops by this particular booth because they had pure extractions of terpines in little sniff jars. While caryophyllene is my personal favorite, I would cycle though the whole list, taking the time to appreciate the flowers every time I walked by.

My first stop was on Green Leaf Labs booth.  This laboratory has been in operation since 2011. They have continued to invest in state of the art potency testing equipment to provide their clients with the best possible. Elaine Miller explained to me that her lab provides diverse testing throughout the state of Oregon. With a 4-5 day turnaround, no currier fee, and the ability to test at the farm or pick up samples for testing back at the lab, Green Leaf Labs is a great solution for farmers looking to sell their product to a dispensary or other licensed distributors.

I ended up making several stops by this particular booth because they had pure extractions of terpines in little sniff jars. While caryophyllene is my personal favorite, I would cycle though the whole list, taking the time to appreciate the flowers every time I walked by.

My next stop was the Phylos Bioscience booth. Phylos Genetics has been operating for the last 2 years and has the ability to sex a plant only 7 days after popping from seed. What does that mean? Simply put, they can determine if a seedling is male or female one week into the grow process. The normal alternative is to wait until about 1-2 weeks into the flowering stage for spore pods to begin forming and risk pollinating the whole crop. The total time and energy investment involved in this method can range anywhere from a few weeks to several months, just to find out that the plant you have is capable of producing smokable product.

Phylos had me at genetic sequencing. Since I write often on specific strains, I intimately know the challenges of providing accurate and useful information. The market is full of genetically diverse strains all being marketed under the guise of a common name. Nowhere is this more prevalent in my experience than Blue Dream. No two vendor samples have been quite the same. Phylos explained to me why that is.

This range of expressions is partly due to the myriad of growers over time calling their home grown plants by popular names and partly due to genetic instability within those specific genetic profiles. Phylos offers a better way of classifying specific cannabis phenotypes. They sequence the genetic profile and compare it to an aggregate of genetic profiles to determine where it sits at the genetic table. Do you want to prove that your strain is a true landrace strain like Durban Poison or Hindu Kush? Phylos can help. Send in a sample and within 48 hours of them receiving it, you have the results. Not only will they be able to tell you if it is a true blue winner or a poser, they can tell you what it is actually related to genetically. That AK-47 you have been growing for the last 10 years might just be Afghani. The only way to be sure is by getting it genetically tested and Phylos is the lab for that.

Be sure to check out the rest of our coverage of the 2016 Redmond Oregon THC Fair as well! Thanks for reading.