Our research farm

Because it is three things at once: a real medical need, a crop valuable enough to pay for serious instrumentation, and an unusually good plant to learn on.

The need is not abstract. Portugal ships out far more medical cannabis than it makes available to its own patients, on our reading of the export and dispensing figures around 647 times more. The economics matter too, because sequencing and sensing never pencil out on a commodity crop and they do on this one. And the plant itself is generous with data. We grow from seed and track every plant individually, so genetics and season can be read side by side, and it gives dozens of measurable cannabinoid and terpene readouts. Pharmaceutical-grade cultivation legally requires the per-plant record that every other agricultural-AI company has to ask a farmer for.

There is also the matter of how long we have been at this together. Genomic work places cannabis among the first plants we ever domesticated, in East Asia in the early Neolithic, roughly twelve thousand years ago. It is close to the beginning of agriculture itself, not long after we domesticated the dog.

It never really left. Hemp rope and sailcloth were so ordinary for so long that the word canvas descends from cannabis. Herodotus described Scythians throwing it on hot stones, and in 2019 archaeologists found the braziers in a Pamir burial ground, with residue that matched. It appears in the oldest Chinese pharmacopoeia. Then in 1961 a UN convention placed it in the most restricted schedule available, and most of the gathering stopped. The UN reversed that particular classification in 2020.

Sixty years of that is why a plant this old is still so thinly characterised, and why there is still so much left in it to find. Cannabis is not incidental to Siren, and it is not all of Siren. It is the right crop for our research farm.

Because you cannot learn a climate in a sealed room.

Indoor cultivation exists to remove variance, and that variance is exactly what we are trying to model. Outdoors is also far lower-carbon and lower-cost: one crop a year, March to October, under the sun rather than under lights.

It is harder. Weather is not a parameter we control, and a bad season is a real season. That is precisely why the data is worth having.

A technology company that happens to own a farm, and uses it hard.

The platform has been running on a client's land since October 2026. The farm in Tondela is where everything gets tried first, at our own risk, before it reaches anyone else's crop. Once the licence comes through it will also grow something valuable enough to fund the engineering.

Four things tie the two together.

• Cash. Once licensed, crop revenue funds engineering.
• Data. Every season adds labelled records that cannot be bought.
• Model training. Our land and our clients' farms are the ground truth.
• Hardware testing. Sensors run on our own land first.

The farm is not a side business. It is the instrument.

Partly because it is home, and because the land was securable. We own it freehold, which means we can run an experiment that costs a season without asking anyone's permission.

And partly because the Dão is a serious growing region. Granite soils, shelter from the Caramulo and Estrela ranges, and a wide swing between day and night temperature are what made it one of Portugal's great wine regions. For a plant whose value sits in its volatile chemistry, that swing is not a romantic detail.

It also means the jobs and the spending land in a part of Portugal that needs them.

For almost everything we do, there is nothing to license. Portugal does not require permission to farm, and none of our tools need it either. Plantologist and Pluvora run on nine crops today, on our own land and on a client's, with no authorisation involved.

The licence we are pursuing is narrow and specific: an INFARMED authorisation to cultivate cannabis for medical use, on our research farm. It covers that one crop, on that one piece of land, and nothing else. The application has been filed. It has not been issued, and we will not call ourselves licensed until it is.

Nothing else waits on it.