By Daniel Rothberg, Las Vegas Sun

Leaders of Nevada’s emerging marijuana industry say there are few consumable substances watched more closely than the vegetation that goes into cannabis products.

Over the last decade, as nearly 25 states have authorized the use of marijuana in some form, several jurisdictions have imposed rules that require the substance be tracked from seed to sale. For regulators and sellers, it’s a daunting process for a plant that often changes hands and takes on many forms before it becomes a final product — a joint, an edible, a topical cream, etc.

To ease data collection, states and marijuana establishments have turned to niche software providers who have made a business out of organizing data from harvest site to dispensary. Generally, the software works with a system of serial numbers, starting with each plant in a harvest getting one of its own. When the harvest batch is sent for extraction or made into an edible product, each byproduct gets another serial number — known as the child batch. As the plant goes through each stage of production — testing, cooking — it gets new serial numbers to track its process while retaining the old serial numbers to show where it’s been. That data can be translated to a barcode on the product.

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