HempCyberFarm Answer 3 Italy

Answer 3 Italian Hemp-seed

3. Italian strains to use and their prices:

The European Union list of cultivars of agricultural crops includes three Italian Hemp cultivars: ‘Carmagnola’, ‘CS’ and ‘Fibranova’ which are commercially represented by the Istituto Sperimentale per le Colture Industriali. These cultivars have been practically unavailable for a few decades. Recently this institute has started to multiply again ‘Carmagnola’ and ‘Fibranova’. Legal obstacles, however, seem to obstruct the commercial distribution of Hemp-seed. So far, small samples of these cultivars are available for research purposes only. Two additional Italian cultivars ‘Eletta Campana’ and ‘Superfibra’, are listed by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) on the schemes for the varietal certification of seed moving in international trade. They are said to be distributed by the Instituto di Agronomia Generale e Coltivatione Erbacee Universita degli Studi, but they are not really available. The general unavailability of Italian cultivars is probably due to legal reasons. Hemp cultivation is prohibited in Italy as long as there isn't a cultivar with a morphological marker which is genetically linked to low THC-content. A research program aiming at such a solution seems to have been activated in 1994.

‘Carmagnola’ is a Northern Italian landrace. ‘CS’ or ‘Carmagnola Selezionata’ is dioecious and selected in the early 1960s from ‘Carmagnola’.

‘Fibranova’ is a dioecious cultivar, selected in the 1950s from the progeny of ‘Bredemann Eletta’ x ‘Carmagnola’. The parent ‘Bredemann Eletta’ (or ‘Bredemann Elite’) which was received from the German Max-Planck-Institut, is one of Bredemann’s high fiber selections obtained from Northern and/or Central Russian Hemp strains, as were used in the breeding of ‘Fibrimon’ and ‘Bialobrzeskie’.

‘Eletta Campana’ (dioecious) resulted from a cross between the ‘Carmagnola’ landrace and high fiber strains from German origin, most likely ‘Fibridia’ or again one of the Bredemann selections. No information was found on the pedigree of ‘Superfibra’.

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*Industrial-Hemp has no psychoactive properties following definition of the European Economic Community (EEC); THC content is less than 0.3%. In general, low THC-seed varieties without psychoactive properties are those that have a THC content of less than 1%. (See also No-THC Hemp-seed.) THC= Delta-9 TetraHydroCannabinol.