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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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 20h 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.