The Divine Farmer
Before it was anything you could buy, cannabis was sacred.
We tend to talk about this plant in the language of the present — terpenes, percentages, the newest cross. But the plant is older than all of it. Older than the brands, older than the laws, older than most of the crops we still eat. To grow it is to stand at the end of a line that runs back thousands of years, into the first gardens human beings ever kept.
One of those gardens was in ancient China.
In China it was má — and it was everywhere. Among the oldest cultivated plants in the country, its seed was counted among the wu gu, the five sacred grains: a staple, a fiber, a food. It fed people, clothed them, and made the paper they would one day write their philosophy on.
It was also medicine. The oldest Chinese herbal we know of, the Shennong Bencao Jing — the “Classic of the Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica” — set cannabis down in writing nearly two thousand years ago. The book takes its name from Shennong, the Divine Farmer: the mythic emperor said to have tasted every plant to learn its nature, and to have handed agriculture and herbal medicine to his people.
A plant counted among the sacred grains. A book named for the Divine Farmer. We didn’t plan the rhyme with our own roots — but we don’t mind it.
The deeper thread is Taoist.
Centuries after the Bencao Jing, a sage named Tao Hongjing — physician, alchemist, and keeper of the Taoist lineage called Shangqing, “Highest Clarity” — gathered the old plant knowledge and added his own. Cannabis was in it. To the Taoists, the natural world wasn’t raw material to be used up; it was the Way made visible — something to be read and revered. The plant belonged to that world.
That posture — reverence over consumption, attention over appetite — is the part worth carrying forward. Long before anyone optimized this plant, people sat with it. Paid attention to it. Let it be what it was.
That’s the spirit we named Balance of the Tao for.
A Deep Chunk daughter, she’s exactly what her name promises: floral up top, soft cream beneath, a quiet citrus tail. Nothing dominates. Nothing shouts. The pieces hold each other in proportion — which is, more or less, the whole of Taoist thought. The Tao doesn’t force; it balances. Water wears down stone not by striking it but by yielding. The plant that lasts is the one that bends.
Every strain in our Divine Roots line is named for something we hold respect for — a philosophy, a tradition, a moment the plant earned. Balance of the Tao is our tip of the cap to the oldest way of seeing this plant: as an old soul, worthy of reverence.
For a company that starts everything from seed, it’s hard to imagine a truer sentence. Every plant we’ve ever grown began as something you could lose in the creases of your palm. Patience isn’t a virtue we added to the work — it is the work.
Old souls, all of them. 👁