Tissue Culture Is A Labor of Learning
Della Fetzer of Rebel Cultures on pathogens, propagation, and why tissue culture rewards patience over profit
Della Fetzer built Rebel Cultures with a calibrated view of tissue culture: it works, but only when it’s the right tool and used correctly. As founder and CEO of the Michigan-based tissue culture lab, Fetzer works across conservation, agriculture, forestry, and horticulture to help growers, nonprofits, and government agencies complete specialized projects and build lasting propagation capacity. After moderating Indoor Ag-Con’s first dedicated tissue culture session in February 2026, she talked with us about what growers consistently misunderstand, why the industry’s genetic concentration deserves more attention, and what honest expectations look like for operations considering tissue culture for the first time.
Many CEA operators are exploring higher-value crops like berries, wasabi, and specialty ornamentals, but struggle with clean, consistent starting material. How does tissue culture specifically solve those pain points & what should a grower realistically expect in terms of timelines and costs when they first engage a lab partner like Rebel Cultures?
When done right and cared for properly, tissue culture can effectively remove three key threats from a grower’s operation: pathogens in starting material, growth inconsistency, and the inability to scale without exponential cost. Of course, removing these threats isn’t free. The costs are typically higher prices for starter material, a steeper learning curve to properly harden (or “acclimatize”) early stage tissue culture plants, and longer lead times before consistent propagation starts.
Expect 6 to 12 months for the first trial and production batches after tasking a lab with a new project. If the lab already has the cultivars you need in stock (and the license to propagate them for you), the timeline may be shorter depending on the lab’s availability and production capacity. Also expect costs to range wildly from $0.50 to several dollars per plant based on plant type, order volume, ordered stage, and even seasonal timing.
At Rebel Cultures specifically, we work with growers to build propagation capacity for custom projects. This means we offer personalized education and production flexibility while growers are still testing multiple solutions, before we hand the protocol off to the grower’s own internal operations or a dedicated production lab.
Most commercial CEA operations source genetics from a handful of large suppliers and crop breeders. What does that concentration mean for the industry’s long-term vulnerability?
It’s an interesting question. The short answer is: more crop biodiversity means lower risk of plant disease outbreaks, and more suppliers means lower risk of supply chain collapse. One of the biggest concerns with the current market is many labs’ reliance on antibiotic additives in plant growth media, which may be weakening plants over time. Currently, the use of these additives is not required to be disclosed to growers. It’s impractical to avoid monocrops in agriculture or CEA, but it’s important to approach the risk responsibly. Since monocrops are a high risk, high reward bet, we can remind ourselves that it’s only a matter of time before high risk bets become expensive. To manage this risk exposure, growers and the greater CEA industry need to be proactive through diversification of crops and suppliers.
On a practical level, growers should keep trying new cultivars and crops. If you’re sourcing from one lab, have a backup lab set up and consider placing orders with them occasionally. If you have high-value genetic lines, consider banking them at multiple facilities. Our team at Rebel Cultures mitigates risk by maintaining multiple lines of each cultivar, cycled at different times, in case of a rare equipment or operator incident. It’s the kind of insurance no one wants to pay for until they need it.
There’s some confusion in the CEA space about when tissue culture makes sense versus other propagation methods. What are the clearest signs that a grower or operation is ready (or not ready) to incorporate tissue culture into their supply chain, and what are the most common mistakes you see operators make when they jump in too early?
If an operation is struggling with availability of starting material, pathogens, consistency, or scaled production, and isn’t scared by paying a higher price per starter plant, tissue culture is worth a try. Purchasing culture plants to test it is relatively low risk. The plants are unlikely to spread pathogens to other crops unless they’re from an untrustworthy lab or a pathogen like powdery mildew is contracted and transmitted inside an operation. The greatest risks are that growers could struggle learning how to properly care for the immature plants and could see higher losses than usual at first.
The bigger mistake I see is growers looking at the price of tissue culture, doing some napkin math about how much cheaper or even lucrative it would be to set up their own lab, then buying equipment and supplies they don’t know how to use without visiting other labs and seeking quality mentorship. This is one of the fastest ways to lose thousands of dollars in the industry. It’s why there’s so much used, nearly new tissue culture equipment on the market.
That said, if you’re dedicated to the process, willing to spend the high upfront cost, okay with it taking over a year to produce anything worthwhile, and willing to ask for help from professionals, in-house tissue culture can unlock unique propagation opportunities. Anyone who gets into it for cash alone will probably be disappointed. Tissue culture is a labor of learning.
Rebel Cultures works across conservation, forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. How does cross-industry learning translate into better outcomes for your CEA and commercial agriculture partners? Can you give an example where a method or insight from conservation work improved a commercial growing project?
As we’ve seen in CEA, it’s a detriment to only know one crop. If you only know the lettuce industry, the tomato industry, or the strawberry industry, you’re automatically more at risk than an operator who understands all three. We take this to the extreme at Rebel Cultures by consistently working on projects across multiple industries. This gives us the broadest possible cross section of best practices, from communication, to growing, to funding, to scaling plant production.
One example: we learned about best acclimatization practices from an ornamental woody plant grower, then used that knowledge to help acclimatize rare trees for a nonprofit forestry grower, who taught us about grant funding for tissue culture propagation. We built on that to help another grower apply for grant funding to develop a supply chain with properly acclimatized rhubarb, dramatically reducing their potential out-of-pocket R&D costs while positioning to help other specialty crop growers bring new crops online. Specialty crop agriculture is declining 2x faster in my home state of Michigan than the US national average, so opportunities like these to support growers in building propagation and funding capacity are critical for the industry to survive.
Working across industries also keeps our perspective calibrated. Our team only recommends tissue culture when it’s the right tool to achieve a project’s mission. Depending on the industry, tissue culture gets seen as an old boring tool to optimize, a novelty too expensive to justify, or an exciting new angle to monetize. Instead of any one of those, we see it as a tool for building high-impact propagation capacity when other methods underperform.
You moderated the first dedicated tissue culture session at Indoor Ag-Con 2026. What was the conversation in that room that surprised you most? And, based on where the CEA industry is heading, what do you think the tissue culture conversation will look like at Indoor Ag-Con five years from now?
It was an honor and a blast to moderate Indoor Ag-Con’s first tissue culture session alongside three industry experts: Hsien Easlon from Micro Paradox, Rinnie Rodenius from Polymorph, and Micah Stevens from Sierra Gold Nurseries. Between the four of us, we shared 62 years of tissue culture experience across 1,400+ cultivars – how could it not be a fun and educational conversation?
The assumption I heard which surprised and scared me most was when both novices and those with moderate experience talked about tissue culture as if it’s guaranteed to eliminate pathogens. The reality is that certain pathogens, and sometimes even pests, can survive the tissue culture initiation process. Whether you’re working with plants suspected to be clean or known to be infected, pre-tissue culture pathogen indexing of source material is a recommended best practice. It gives labs a complete picture of plant health before the process starts. And when culturing infected plants to eliminate pathogens, testing quarantined plantlets post-tissue culture is essential before those plants go anywhere near others.
In five years, as lessons are learned and margins tighten, the efficient and passionate labs will endure, grow, and continue adding value to the industry while others fall away. Conversations around tissue culture in CEA will gradually become less sensational and more practical, where tissue culture is the trusted solution for overcoming pathogens and scaling bottlenecks. We’re meant to grow interesting crops on our farms and see interesting foods at the market. Without them, life would be sad and boring. Ultimately, the CEA industry will see tissue culture for what it is: a tool for building high-impact propagation capacity when other methods can’t meet critical goals.
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A consistent theme across the panel was how important it is to begin with clean, uniform plants. Many higher value crops grown indoors depend on vegetative starts rather than seed, which makes the condition of the starting material a major factor in overall success. Vegetative starts can include cuttings, runners, rhizomes, bare roots, tissue culture, and other methods that require clean and consistent plant material from the beginning.
As growers move into crops such as strawberries, cane berries, wasabi, and specialty ornamentals, many discover that traditional propagation brings limitations. Pathogens spread easily, mother plants break down over time, and plants can behave inconsistently when the starting material is not clean.
Growers do not need to run a tissue culture lab to benefit from one. What matters is knowing:
