Ask a grower what a clone costs and the answer is usually a few francs of labour and a rooting cube. Ask what the mother room costs and the conversation changes. Here is a simple way to compare the two systems over a year.
The hidden line items of a mother room
- Space and energy. Mothers occupy canopy that never flowers. Lighting, climate control and irrigation run twelve months a year.
- Labour. Pruning, feeding, pest scouting and taking cuttings on schedule.
- Losses. Rooting failures, pest outbreaks, and the occasional mother that has to be destroyed.
- Drift. Every generation of cuttings moves further from the original selection. Vigour and potency decline slowly enough that nobody notices until the lab report does.
- Pathogen risk. One latent infection in a mother room becomes an infection in every plant on the floor.
What changes with in vitro plantlets
Plantlets arrive clean, uniform and at the same developmental stage. There is no mother room to run, so that space flowers instead. Batches are ordered to a calendar, which makes labour planning easier. And because each batch comes from a banked, tested line, the cultivar does not drift.
A worked comparison
Take a facility that flowers 2,000 plants per cycle, five cycles a year. Running mothers for that volume typically takes 8 to 12 percent of canopy plus a dedicated person for part of each week. If clean in vitro starting material lets that canopy flower and lifts the average yield by even five percent by removing latent infections, the plantlets pay for themselves in the first cycle, before counting the reduced risk of a total loss.
When cuttings still make sense
Small grows with a handful of mothers and no pathogen problems can run cuttings economically, as long as new genetics are tested before they enter. Many growers use a hybrid: clean mothers from tissue culture, replaced every few cycles, and cuttings taken from them in between. That keeps the genetics clean without changing the whole workflow.
Want the numbers for your own facility? Tell us your volumes and we will run the comparison with you.