Hi y’all. We’re LeafWorks, a botanical genetics company serving the cannabis, hemp, and traditional herbal markets. With our passion for medicinal plants, we’re here to offer DNA tools built with the herbal community to serve the community. At our core, we’re a DNA identification company that places Good Business Practices and community empowerment above all else. This blog post and many more will be written by us at LeafWorks speaking to you, our customers and community. Get to know us. Ask us questions. We’re happy to answer them and are always down to chat about plants.
We’re often asked how we started. While we had the concept and ability to move forward, it took us two years to launch LeafWorks. Building relationships, being an active member of our community, and laying the solid groundwork for good science was extremely important to us. Instead of quickly jumping into the Cannabis and Herbal markets, we made space to listen and build a business that honors the plants, culture, and the people we work with. How? We are the only plant genetics company we know of that refuses to work with unverified data and is committed to working directly with substantiated germplasm sources for our Certified Reference Material. It’s our goal to build DNA tools that lift up our clients, never to compete with them. Being respectful of those who come before you takes time, and we wanted to recognize the farmers, breeders, and stewards of these plants. As such, we have built a DNA testing company for cannabis, hemp, and traditional herbal spaces that combines modern science with community awareness, respect, and integrity.
To meet our mission’s ethos: to build DNA tools for a community and culture we respect, we intentionally built LeafWorks on four pillars of responsibility and accountability. The first pillar is community responsibility. The second is scientific responsibility. The third is environmental responsibility. The fourth is workplace responsibility.
Those are our ethics, but who are we? Well, we are many things: We’re an impassioned team of plant scientists who bucked the ivory tower institutions and big ag corporations in favor of practical application of our science and meaningful community interactions. We’re activists making genetics and education about genetics more accessible. We’re a female-founded startup operating at the epicenter of the cannabis and herbal markets in Northern California. Our CEO is a trained herbalist. We have more office dogs than executive staff. We’re passionate gardeners and nerds who sing out loud a lot, usually off key. Simply put, we are real people that care a lot about plants, and those that grow them.
We formed LeafWorks because biotech companies that put Good Business Practices, environmental sustainability, and community empowerment above the bottom line simply don’t exist. We wanted to make a company that we would be proud of, and one that makes conscious decisions to stay accountable to the community we serve, the science we love, the environment we need, and the team we’re growing.
Why start with Cannabis? Why not? The cannabis community is a particularly colorful and diverse segment of the herbal world. With a history and workflow shrouded in secrecy due to the vestiges of prohibition, this community is particularly important to us at LeafWorks. Cannabis cultivators and product makers have stewarded an amazingly powerful medicinal plant against overwhelming adversity and personal hardship. It’s their hard work and dedication that have acted to expand and diversify the Cannabis and hemp plant we all now have the benefit from. We know that it’s critically important to support and propel these creative forward-thinking “renegades” to continue their work. It’s the reason our founders also started a non-profit, the Canndor Herbarium, as a way to facilitate good science and help document cannabis diversity to empower cannabis cultivators.
Here at LeafWorks, we’ve spent a lot of time creating a heart-forward, community-first, genetics company; a bottom-up business where our customers serve as our teachers. We realize that our success is predicated on the success of our clients and offering scientific tools that help them do what they do best - grow, collect, process, and create products with transparency and the highest quality standards. Our ethos and company culture are grounded in this collaborative spirit. At LeafWorks we are part of the fabric of the herbal community.
With Gratitude,
The LeafWorks Team
