If corporations own the seeds of almost everything we eat, why hasn’t anyone managed to do the same thing to cannabis?
Until now, cannabis has lived in a kind of legal and cultural side universe where the usual machinery of seed monopolies never fully clicked into place. That universe is ending. The changes converging around 2026, especially the shift to regulating seeds by THC potential and the slow march toward rescheduling, represent the first plausible structural opening for a Monsanto-style player in weed.
To see what might happen, I have to start with why it hasn’t happened yet.
How Weed Escaped Monsanto While Everything Else Got Captured
The commercial seed market has been growing steadily since the 1990s, driven by deep changes in intellectual property regimes at the core of contemporary capitalism—changes that are hard to fully unpack in a short article. By 2025, the global commercial seed market is already worth north of $80 billion a year and is on track to reach $130–150 billion before the decade is over. While for centuries seeds circulated largely free of modern legal constraints, a large portion of today’s food system now runs on proprietary genetics: patented hybrids in corn and soy, licensed varieties in vegetables, and stacked traits in cotton. Consolidation in the seed sector means that a handful of international firms—such as Bayer (which absorbed Monsanto following its acquisition of the company in 2018), Corteva, Syngenta, and a small supporting cast—control huge portions of the market.
Cannabis, meanwhile, has exploded into its own industrial universe. In the United States alone, regulated adult-use and medical sales were around $31.5 billion in 2025, with forecasts suggesting the national market will approach $40 billion by the end of the decade. Globally, the legal cannabis market is already in the $70 billion range and is projected to more than triple by 2033. That is exactly the kind of growth curve that usually attracts seed giants.
And yet there is still no single company that owns the genetics of cannabis in the way Monsanto once owned Roundup Ready soybeans. There are brands and a few IP-heavy biotech startups, but nothing resembling a true genetic gatekeeper.
Why is that?
The first, most obvious reason is federal illegality. You cannot build a national seed monopoly on a crop that cannot legally move across state lines. For decades, high-THC cannabis has sat in Schedule I. That status has not prevented the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from issuing large numbers of cannabis-related patents—particularly since 2019—but it has made large-scale genetic consolidation legally and financially risky. At the same time, the groundwork for a future privatization of cannabis genetics has quietly been laid.
A 2025 USPTO patent-mapping analysis by Ruth Fisher, PhD, illustrates this clearly. Out of 8,719 cannabis patents she cleaned and classified, most cluster around therapeutics and delivery systems. But there is also a distinct cultivation block where the four largest categories are exactly what one would expect in a pre-Monsanto moment: patents on cannabis plants themselves, patents on gene editing, patents on boosting yield-related traits, such as cannabinoids and terpenes, and patents on pest and fungus resistance. Industrial and agricultural giants appear prominently in this space, alongside pharmaceutical and tobacco companies.
Fisher also shows that five companies each hold more than 100 cannabis patents: BASF, the German industrial conglomerate, holds 140; GW Pharma, the UK-based cannabis pharmaceutical company known for Sativex, holds 132; Nicoventures Trading (British American Tobacco), also UK-based, holds 129; Sanofi-Aventis, the French pharmaceutical company, holds 117; and Bayer holds 114.
Around these genetic claims, there is already a halo of patented cultivation structures, hydroponic, aeroponic, and aquaponic systems, sensor-based monitoring platforms, camera and drone surveillance tools, and methods for controlling sex expression, growth cycles, and photoperiods. Taken together, Fisher’s map suggests that while cannabis seeds have long circulated within an informal, quasi-open-source ecosystem, the legal scaffolding of a proprietary seed regime could be being assembled already. The 2026 shift in hemp definitions threatens to give this existing IP architecture much sharper teeth.
Before trademarks were even imaginable in cannabis, genetics evolved in basements, hillside terraces, and underground greenhouses, carried by hand and word of mouth between Humboldt, Amsterdam, Punjab, Oaxaca, the Rif, and countless other microcultures. Strains were shared, renamed, mislabeled, stabilized, and destabilized. In this context, ownership was always difficult to define.
That culture shaped cannabis’ intellectual-property strategies. In most major crops, breeders lock in value by patenting varieties or registering them under Plant Variety Protection.
In cannabis, the dominant approach more closely resembled trade secrecy. Breeders held onto cuts, sold clones instead of seeds (which were illegal until 2018), kept elite genetics within closed circles, and relied on trust, NDAs, or sheer caution. Many became accustomed to guarding a single mother plant as their primary asset.
Meanwhile, the formal IP system continued to expand around the plant. Patent-mapping studies now find roughly 1,500 to 2,000 cannabis patent publications per year when applications covering extracts, formulations, and medical uses are included.
There is also a biological constraint. Cannabis has a dual nature as both a commodity and a specialty crop. Monoculture is difficult to impose on a plant whose value depends on unstable combinations of cannabinoids, terpenes, and environmental stress. The idea of one corporation owning “the” cannabis seed in a structurally fragmented genetics market has long seemed implausible. Underneath it all lies a deep historical breeding culture: cannabis survived prohibition precisely because people refused to surrender control over it.
What Changes in 2026 Do to Possible Futures
Under regulatory changes scheduled to take effect in late 2026—though delays might happen—“hemp” will be defined by total THC potential, including THCA and other THC-like cannabinoids. A legal hemp seed will explicitly be defined as one that can be shown, on paper, to produce plants that remain below the 0.3% threshold. Any genetics likely to exceed that limit will, by definition, be classified as marijuana.
Overlay rescheduling onto this shift and the picture sharpens. As cannabis moves from Schedule I to Schedule III, high-THC varieties may become eligible for the same forms of IP protection already available to hemp, such as Plant Variety Protection certificates, utility patents on traits, and stackable rights that allow claims over genetic material that was previously unclaimable.
The USDA’s Plant Variety Protection Office already grants 20-year certificates for seed varieties in other crops. Once marijuana leaves the federal “no-touch” category, there is no obvious reason cannabis could not be added to that system.
In other words, after 2026, it becomes possible to imagine a breeder filing for PVP protection on a THC-compliant hemp line, layering a utility patent over a high-THC trait stack, and licensing those genetics under agreements similar to those governing GMO corn. The global commercial seed market would then have a convincing business case to treat cannabis as just another high-value segment.
The enforcement machinery already exists. We have seen how aggressively global brands respond when their IP appears in cannabis edibles and branding. Candy and snack companies have successfully sued over infringing THC “Skittles” and “Nerds,” while apparel giants have pursued weed brands that borrowed logos or slogans. These trademark cases are not seed law, but they offer an early lesson: once cannabis operates within the same legal arena as other regulated industries, actors fluent in that arena will use every tool available.
Or Can the Commons Fight Back?
So is a Monsanto of cannabis coming?
For the first time in decades, the structural conditions to support one are falling into place. The industry is large enough to justify the effort, the patent landscape is dense enough to support complex portfolios, and regulators are rewriting definitions in ways that push legal significance upstream to the seed rather than downstream to the flower. That is precisely the recipe that reshaped other crops.
Yet cannabis still has features that resist enclosure. One is sheer genetic diversity. Another is time. Building a true Monsanto requires years of acquisition, licensing, and litigation. The 2026 shift does not erase the existing genetic commons overnight. Instead, it triggers a race between capital seeking enclosure and communities working to publish, document, and preserve access.
We are already seeing the outlines of that second response. Breeders are publishing full genomes and partial marker panels of flagship strains because public disclosure can establish prior art and block later patents. Scientists are launching open cannabis genomic databases. Lawyers are drafting open-source breeder licenses that function like a GPL for seeds, requiring derivatives to remain in the commons. Activists are pointing to existing seed-sharing and farmer-rights protections for heirloom crops as precedents that cannabis could one day follow.
For growers and breeders, pretending this is not happening is the fastest way to lose. The window before late 2026 is when growers and breeders need to document pedigrees, bank germplasm, sequence important lines where possible, and decide whether a lifetime of breeding work will remain a living genetic resource—or become a footnote in someone else’s patent portfolio.
Cover photo created with AI.
