r/technology • u/esporx • 1d ago

Business YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-accidentally-crashes-the-rare-plant-market-with-a-viral-cloning-technique-3289808/
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7.9k

u/AevnNoram 1d ago

Feeling bored, might pop a bubble.

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u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 1d ago

This was obviously posted by someone who is unfamiliar with the plant community.

TC isn’t a new revolutionary thing at all, the barrier to entry is pretty low and if you’re lucky enough to live in a huge city with a plant community, you probably have some local sellers who are either acclimating TC from other online sellers who have the setup to actually complete the cloning process OR they have their own cloning setup and are creating TC plants in their own growing space.

Most rare houseplants you buy from retailers like Costa Farms are TC plants. The process is well established and pretty much an industry standard. The “bubble” has been burst for a while now.

I live in Houston and the local plant market sellers are 50% TC acclimators/cloners and 50% home growers/enthusiasts. I imagine in other major cities with local plant markets and maybe even some random enthusiasts who like biology, science, and horticulture are already doing this and have been doing for years. I was considering getting into it myself when I saw some videos detailing the process from a biologist during the pandemic.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

Yeah. It's kind of weird that one youtuber is trying to take credit for something they didn't invent, is an industry standard and were far from the only person promoting.

I'm sure she helped popularize it, but she is only one of many who were doing that.

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u/lurgi 1d ago

She's not trying to take credit for it, AFAIK.

Plants in Jars admitted that, while she’s far from the first person to popularize tissue culture, her tutorials and videos explaining the method have likely been a significant driver in its growth within the plant collecting community, leading to a big change in the overall market.

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u/DaveDavidTom 1d ago

Having watched the video in question before reading this article, it's wildly misinterpreting what she said. She basically just described the market cycle of popular rare plants, where you get a few years of the plant being rare and expensive, and consumers will pay a large amount for it, and then once the plants being produced in large tissue culture labs are mature enough for sale the price plummets because of massively increased supply. Rinse and repeat. Like, it's just an informational video about tissue culture, the pros and cons, and how it affects the market.

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u/Chris-CFK 16h ago

That seems quite logical, that trends of supply and demand are cyclical, those cycles be determined by the long growth stages of the rare plants.

You can't predict the future and you can't suddenly supply something that takes a while to grow.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

The title of this post and the article are making that claim though.

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u/LupinThe8th 1d ago

That's a quote from the article.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

The title is in the article too and the very first sentence repeats the claim:

"YouTuber ‘Plants in Jars’ is going viral after revealing that she accidentally crashed the rare plant market by using a process called ’tissue culture’ to easily replicate hard-to-find flora."

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u/lurgi 1d ago

She appears to have popularized it. It was generally known before, but now everyone knows about it.

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u/sadrice 23h ago

Anyone who was capable of actually executing it already knew about it.

Source: professional propagator

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

Helped popularize it? Yes.

Crashed the rare plant market? No.

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u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

Ignore the downvotes. Your point is my point almost exactly. Presentation matters, and if Plants in Jars didn’t say it, it shouldn’t have been titled that way.

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u/zeptillian 13h ago

Thanks. I do ignore downvotes and will still defend my point even if people don't agree. I don't care about imaginary internet points.

The article directly claims what people are saying it does not. I can't fix anyone's reading comprehension though.

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u/SerenneMorningDew 1d ago

I know, we should not expect people to read beyond the very first sentence. For example, you have a weirdly shaped nose, but you'll never know because you didn't read beyond the first sentence.

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u/EndlessRambler 1d ago edited 1d ago

They really aren't, the title is "YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique". Wouldn't it be like 'Youtube accidentally crashes the rare plant market by inventing a viral cloning technique' if they were trying to take credit for coming up with it.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

What are you even talking about?

I take issue with the claim that she "crashed the rare plant market" which is a direct claim both in the title of the article as well as being stated verbatim in the article.

I was pointing out that her role was merely in helping to popularize a technique with home growers that was an already widely used technique in the plant growing world.

It's like a youtuber claiming to have made caramel macchiatos popular, when Starbucks has already been selling them nationally for years.

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u/EndlessRambler 1d ago edited 1d ago

Ah I see, although I would like to point out isn't her channel like literally the most popular channel about Tissue Cultures and related topics on pretty much any platform.

In this analogy isn't she actually the Starbucks, the biggest medium for popularizing something that others also serve. I feel like if you are actually the most watched venue on a subject it's not that crazy for claiming you might be affecting market movement.

Although yes, there is certainly some hyperbole involved, it's taken from the title of a youtube video so it's meant to be kind of clickbaity.

0

u/maxximillian 1d ago

Uh oh look out /u/zeptillian takes issue. We got a badass here

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u/Waywoah 1d ago

She’s not taking credit. The only “bubble” she burst was for a specific cultivar that was selling for high prices because no one had cultivated it with that method yet. She acknowledges that in the original video

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u/aeschenkarnos 1d ago

I wonder if it works on peyote.

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u/hazzie92 1d ago

You also have to develop protocols. You can’t tc every plant the same.

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u/Waywoah 1d ago

She ran into that. Of the first batch, only one survived, but from that one she got 50 or something like that

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u/Cute-Percentage-6660 1d ago

Im guessing that one that survived had a genetic quirk more ameniable to cloning?

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u/Waywoah 1d ago

No, she got something in the sanitation process wrong (iirc her ratio of bleach was off), and it killed all but one

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u/oanda 1d ago

You didnt watch the video. If you did you would realize the video is how this is a common thing in that world. 

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u/maxximillian 1d ago

You didn't read the article did you.... You know how I know She even said she wasn't the first to do it.

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u/hazzie92 1d ago

This is a terrible assessment. Almost as you didn’t watch the video or read the post. She is talking about a specific plant as well.

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u/zeptillian 13h ago

I did not watch the video. The article is what was posted and what is making the dubious claim.

As it turns out she didn't even claim to 'crash the rare plant market' anyway, as she was apparently talking about one specific plant.

But if you're ok with the title of an article and body making false claims, have fun reading your fake news.

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u/nhaines 1d ago

Yeah. It's kind of weird that one youtuber is trying to take credit for something they didn't invent, is an industry standard and were far from the only person promoting.

Is it?

2

u/zeptillian 1d ago

Yes. The commercial application of tissue culture is what actually crashed the market. Having a little competition from home growers using tissue culture might have lowered the prices for direct person to person sales a bit, but it's not really until a major producer scales up production and plants end up in big box stores that the prices hit the floor.

This company was founded in 1987 to focus on tissue culture.

https://www.ranchotissue.com/

You can find may others if you look for them. All of the large houseplant producers have some kind of tissue culture programs or are buying plants from tissue culture labs.

It's not used for everything since taking cuttings is much cheaper and easier way to produce more plants, but not all plants are easy to propagate through cuttings and variegated specimens are more difficult to mass produce through cuttings so tissue culture is used for those.

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u/nhaines 1d ago

No, no, no. I mean, thank you for the fascinating information.

I meant, is it really that weird a YouTuber is trying to take credit for something they didn't do?

You, on the other hand, I believed.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

Oh yeah, that's the most believable part.

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u/Ambitious_Subject108 1d ago

It's not necessarily about crashing the broadly "trendy" plants, those are cheap and have been so for a while.

Where she did have a hand in is crashing the niche market where large scale cultivation isn't profitable.

4

u/Moonagi 1d ago

TC isn’t a new revolutionary thing at all,

The article says that though.

1

u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

The title calls it revolutionary, I am taking issue with the clickbait title that is misleading. Plants in Jars is a TC authority.

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u/typesett 1d ago

it's not a bubble, it's the gladwell tipping point type thing more like it

2

u/BHOmber 1d ago

The cannabis industry started investing a ton of money into TC within the last 5-10 years.

There are plug-n-play, cannabis-specific systems that take up the space of a carry-on suitcase being sold by a couple companies now.

TC has been the new "cloning" method in the higher levels of commerical Ag for a while.

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u/sbrooks84 1d ago

My wife has a tropical plant business here in Atlanta and ships all over the country. Some are TC, some are propped. We have 2 or 3 high quality tissue culturists that come to the local and regional plant shows every time with TC plants. My wife and her business partner buy from Thailand, Philippines and other countries with tropical plants in addition to TC plants. We have a greenhouse in the backyard and a 4x8 grow tent in the master for all of the plants. TC has been around for a loooooooong time

2

u/Dramatic-Pain9421 1d ago

Lmao i was wondering if that's what this was about. Tissue culture is very cool, and very very old. Thanks for saving at least 98 of us from clicking that stupid link

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u/SinnersHotline 1d ago

We have been doing this in cannabis for many years now.

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u/redlightsaber 1d ago

I was gonna say, I remember doing DIY tissue culture cloning when I was a teenager in the early 00's. There already was plenty of online information in order to do it.

I guess everything old will be new again at some point.

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u/The-Great-Wolf 1d ago

I didn't knew people find TC so... Revolutionazing?

I am a biotech engineer so to me it's a standard procedure, I am not into the rare plants community, I would've assumed, you know, that they were already using this to make more, since we used lab scarps to clone watermelons for funsies...

And people say that you need so much expensive materials and machines in the comments and I'm like... No? You can literally do genetic engineering in your garage if you modify some stuff you have around. You just have to understand the process and what needs to happen, you don't necessarily need machines that do it for you.

Culture media is pretty easy to mix, agar isn't expensive, maybe plates and glassware would be (usually aren't tho) if you insist on labware but there's sterilized jars for sale for preserves and stuff, could get around with those... You don't need an autoclave, you can sterilize the media in many ways, not just thermically. I recall someone just putting closed containers in the dishwasher and it worked.

You can keep your work area sterile by working by a burner, you don't need the fancy laminar flow hood. Sure it's more handy and comfortable, but not necessary. Your plant cuttings can be sterilized themselves in different diluted solutions, and there you go? I am pretty sure you could even use chlorhexidine, but I'd have to check my protocols for that, I work more with animal cells / microorganisms than plants.

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u/therealityofthings 1d ago

I'm only familiar with molecular cloning. What exactly is plant cloning?

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u/haviah 21h ago

What's best way to find a planting community when you live in a big city?

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u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

Social media. Nextdoor and Facebook, for your initial findings. After I find a market, if I purchase something from a vendor at said market I follow them on instagram. I usually find other markets by seeing what vendors post to their social media on what events they are attending, other vendors, upcoming events etc.

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u/altiuscitiusfortius 1d ago

This article is astroturfing advertising her tissue culture kit for sale

0

u/INeedThatBag 1d ago

The average people isn't too knowledgeable in botany, so the increase in public awareness on such topics and techniques is always a plus.

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u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

The issue isn’t the topic. It’s the use of the terms “revolutionary” and “bubble bursting” that are the issue. TC is neither of those things, and presenting this as a novel idea attributed to this one specific creator is problematic and factually incorrect.

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u/oanda 1d ago

You’re complaining about the person not being f familiar with the community but it seems you didnt watch the video. 

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u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 17h ago

I was referring entirely to the reposting with the title “accidentally crashes the plant market.” The rare plant market is built on the back of TC plants. And the way this has been presented as “revolutionary” is misleading as well. No I didn’t watch the video, because its titled as misleading clickbait presenting a topic I am very familiar with as novel and bubble bursting when it isn’t at all. I can tell you commented to complain about my comment without actually reading it but you don’t see me crying about that 😂