Landrace Genetics 101

[TorturedSoul]

But genetic diversity? One could define that in two ways and satisfy each approach. Back when there were hundreds of thousands of landrace stands of cannabis around the world, that might be defined as maximum diversity. But now we've bred them all together and produced brand new genetics, so there's even more diversity. But blending eventually produces mediocrity. And the landraces are steadily disappearing. This is not a healthy trend.

I think I'd argue the opposite was the case. I'm currently lacking the mental prowess to put my arguments (or even thoughts) into words right now, though .

However, I will state that there's a whopping big difference between the amount of genetic diversity in a "traditional farmer's" crop of cannabis... and the (relatively very few) numbers that commercial breeders work with. You mentioned Ace Seeds - and I've read many reports about them, enough to know that this company is generally thought well of - so I'll use them: How many different mother and father plants, or alternatively, how many different ones are used in producing the seeds that they sell (per strain)? I know that they're said to use multiple parent plants for some (perhaps all) of their strains. But I'd guess that, realistically, this number (again, per strain) is a pretty small one.

When I think of a "true IBL," I imagine a field - or maybe even several of them - in which a fair number of plants were allowed to be open-pollinated (by other examples of the same strain). And by "a fair number," I don't mean three, six, or nine, lol - dozens, at least. On the other hand, I expect that most commercial seed production runs use clones of the same basic small set of parental plants.

I might be a bit naive on that, IDK.

blending eventually produces mediocrity. And the landraces are steadily disappearing. This is not a healthy trend.

<NODS>

I can think of a number of animals that have basically been "bred out of existence," due to what I call the "mutt syndrome." There seem to be some parallels here.

On the other hand, the new genetics are typically superior in taste and potency to everything but the best landraces.

From most of what I've seen, "new genetics" is defined by a bunch of pollen-chuckers taking two of their competitors' strains, crossing them, and selling the results as the latest & greatest to the unwashed masses . Often (usually?), this appears to be done by growing out those other strains' seeds... F₁ x (different strain) F₁ = Unstable Phenotype Nightmare.

The market has a large degree of responsibility here, IMHO. The sellers' resources are finite, so it does tend to make sense that they concentrate on traits that sell more product. HIGH potency, visible trichomes, f*cking purple crap, et cetera. Quick-flowering, too, of course. Blah blah effity fookin' blah.

Of course, when the overall average profile of their customer base sort of works out to be comparable to a half-wit... does the seller then have some responsibility to help protect their industry - and, ultimately, their customer base! - from itself, lol? IDK.

I'd like to see more breeding to reinforce landrace traits, and less to produce potent sticky unremarkable strains.

I'd like to see some where they grew out acre-sized grows per strain - but using a large number of different parental plants - when producing seeds of that strain. Or at least gymnasium-sized grows. In combination with a way to guarantee that, in a ten-seed (package) purchase of those seeds, that no more than two came from any one particular set of parents (and one per would be even better).

THAT was one benefit (and about the only one I could envision that'd actually (positively) affect me in any way) that I had hoped would come to pass because of all the (various types of) legalization events that have occurred in this country since the good citizens of California first decided that cannabis should be considered a viable medicine.

I really should have known better, huh?

Personally, if I could make my cannabis seed purchases by sending $130 (or whatever) for a ten-pack to General Delivery, Malawi (et cetera) and know that some local farmer would get the request, pick ten seeds from his seed stock, and ship them off to me. I expect that the farmer would much appreciate this form of seed-buying, too . FFS, if we paid the poor SOBs in Columbia what we pay seedbanks for "Columbian Gold" seeds, it'd do wonders for their standard of living (probably wouldn't hurt the crime statistics down there, either).

But then, almost no one I know cares a rip about what kind of pot it is. I keep asking and they keep not knowing. *shrug*

Hey, at least (I assume) no one has thought for a few moments and then replied that... they're pretty sure... It's that awesome strain called 'Dro.

I mean, for example, just look at Girl Scout Cookies.

Girl Scout Cookies. Diesels. OG "Kush." Whatever the current purple strain of the day happens to be. Et cetera. Ad infinium. Ad nauseum.

<YAWN>

Just generic dope, IMHO.

There are some people who raise conspiracy theories about highway transportation departments spreading out mites in the hopes of crippling cannabis crops, and they reason that because the mites damage such a wide variety of strains that they must be specifically engineered to target cannabis.

LMFAO, thanks for the chuckle. I guess if someone has two joints, but only one brain cell, they might believe that kind of stuff (reverse the joints to brain cells ratio, though, and "might" becomes "won't"). Thankfully, we know that all it takes to "spread mites" is to walk from point A to point B, lol. And that most mites have pretty voracious appetites (and breeding cycles) - and, therefore, no specific engineering is necessary.

Many governments have worked for a long time to eradicate cannabis.

Yeah, I remember the US DEA efforts involving paraquat from about 1975 onwards. But they've gone at the problem from both sides, methinks. Direct eradication efforts - but the D also appears to have been instrumental in getting ol' David Watson (aka Sam the douche bag Skunk Man) set up in business in the Netherlands back in the day. Next time y'all hear a couple of brainiacs discussing the possibility that there are government-produced cannabis mites, lol, drop that little nugget into their ears. . . .

 

[TorturedSoul]

Disappearing landrace strains is a problem but it will take a lot of time. Then cannabis left to her own devices to revert back eventually from all the mucking about with the genetics humans are doing.

All we have to do is look to what humans have done with other plants like Wheat and tomatoes. Tomatoes are very telling as humans took plants and turned them into a tomato plant from something different. Wheat we took advantage of a polytaxy version (mutation breeding) of it and bred that and let go of many of the traditional strains.

Wheat is traditionally produced with landrace strains. By "traditionally" NOT by Europeans or western world. The traditional method is to cross the landrace strains and run them 10 generations... then they call it done and release the seeds like that.

Ah... <SHRUGS> I don't know about tomatoes off hand, but wheat is a crop that has been heavily worked over a period of at least 10,000 years - and is no longer really recognizable as the same species that it once was. Farmers selected for "convenience traits" (ease of harvesting and suchlike), I do remember reading that at one point or other. If I remember correctly, domestic wheat cannot even survive in the wild across generations due to the loss of its natural seed dispersal mechanisms.

And then there's that whole "chicken" thing - an animal that, according to the USDA, is no longer even classified as an animal due to all the f*cking around with it that we've done in the US.

I guess the concept of screwing up shit for fun and quick profit is nothing new.

Bananas... There's a good crop to study. Used to be IDFK how many different varieties. Now, if I understand things correctly, the vast, overwhelming majority of commercially-produced bananas are the Cavendish variety (accounting for, IIRC, something like 99% of the market) - and that one is in pretty severe danger of getting wiped out by the Tropical Race 4 fungus. Back in the 1950s (and for decades before that), the most popular banana in the world was the Gros Michel variety... And then it got wiped out by a fungus (might be an earlier version of the one that the farmers are sh!tting themselves about currently, IDK). This is what happens when one loses - or consciously discards - genetic diversity; when life happens, it is rather unwise (heroically stupid, in fact) to have placed all of one's eggs into the same basket, so to speak.

 

[andIhalped]

Someone was talking recently about how cannabis is so much more genetically diverse than it used to be. I disagreed. Then he disagreed with me disagreeing. Not only that, he Laughed his Ass completely Off, which I feel bad about and I hope he managed to reattach it.

And now that I think about it more- maybe he’s totally right. Or it’s possible we are both right but looking at it in different ways. Apples and oranges. Or I may well be just plain wrong.

If I think of a breeder created strain as a food dish, the land races would be the ingredients.

And it seems to me that there are less of the basic ingredients available now than in the past, as a few landraces and some heirloom strains have been bred out of existence. Where is Panama Red, and what happened to the real Skunk smell, and where did the extreme pine scented Christmas bud go?

Can they be recreated? I suppose given time they can.

But on the other hand, a huge amount of work has been done with the basic ingredients that we do still have, to make the most of them and enhance whatever flavours they contain, as well as bred for higher CBD,THC, and whatever.

So maybe we have less to work with but have done a lot more work with what we do have.

Does this amount to ‘ greater genetic diversity’. I don’t know.

I’ve been living with a botanist friend for the last week or so. He keeps telling me that overall plant diversity is shrinking rapidly, and even though there’s more general availability of fancy houseplants and whatnot, that we may not have seen before, in reality there is much less overall divergence.

So maybe that’s partly why I wrote that post, because I tended to agree with him, and I’m biased because I tend to like the strains that are closer to landrace more than I like the the flavour of the month strains or even most well-established concocted strains.

Anyway- what do you guys think?

There's almost no question that existing commercially available cannabis is much less genetically diverse than was the historical case. First, existing strains not only come from a limited stock of strains, but are also selected for just a few traits such as yield, THC/or CBD content.

The loss of genetic diversity is an extremely well-documented outcome for almost all cultivated plants.

You are correct that in many plants & animals genetic diversity is an evolutionary hedge of sorts for survival of extreme events such as flood, droughts, or pests.

There may still be considerably genetic diversity remaining in some landrace strains that might have not been much affected by breeding.

But: that genetic diversity certainly doesn't exist in modern strains...mainly because some of the phenotypes from diverse genetics aren't appealing to consumers.

 

[TheFertilizer]

A limited stock of strains to begin with doesn't necessarily mean that the genetic viability can't become more diverse over time with open-pollination. When apples came from the old-world there were only a few varieties that settlers liked to propagate by graft and cuttings, but as they moved westward seedlings became a more practical propagation method, especially as some old-world varieties didn't grow well in the new climates. There was a selective effort to make new crosses and select for desirable traits via seed, and so after a while there became thousands of varieties that all began with a pretty limited original gene pool. Yet because they were still allowed to be openly pollinated, and the selection was done on the basis of what grew best, it mimicked a sort of natural selection that meant they also carried the same type of robustness and adaptability. Similarly with cannabis plants, you can still find wild crab apple trees.

But things like the Southern Corn Leaf Blight in 1970 are kind of the reverse of those kinds of success stories. That all started with a "Texas sterile male" cultivar that made detassling easier, and before you knew it nearly 85% of all the crops grown in the south contained genes from this original cultivar, making them susceptible to the corn blight. It wiped out nearly 100% of crops that were susceptible, and the only reason the industry was able to recover was because they had preserved earlier strains that weren't susceptible to the blight. If it weren't for those earlier cultivars being preserved it could have been much worse.

Ah... <SHRUGS> I don't know about tomatoes off hand, but wheat is a crop that has been heavily worked over a period of at least 10,000 years - and is no longer really recognizable as the same species that it once was. Farmers selected for "convenience traits" (ease of harvesting and suchlike), I do remember reading that at one point or other. If I remember correctly, domestic wheat cannot even survive in the wild across generations due to the loss of its natural seed dispersal mechanisms.

And then there's that whole "chicken" thing - an animal that, according to the USDA, is no longer even classified as an animal due to all the f*cking around with it that we've done in the US.

I guess the concept of screwing up shit for fun and quick profit is nothing new.

Bananas... There's a good crop to study. Used to be IDFK how many different varieties. Now, if I understand things correctly, the vast, overwhelming majority of commercially-produced bananas are the Cavendish variety (accounting for, IIRC, something like 99% of the market) - and that one is in pretty severe danger of getting wiped out by the Tropical Race 4 fungus. Back in the 1950s (and for decades before that), the most popular bananau e in the world was the Gros Michel variety... And then it got wiped out by a fungus (might be an earlier version of the one that the farmers are sh!tting themselves about currently, IDK). This is what happens when one loses - or consciously discards - genetic diversity; when life happens, it is rather unwise (heroically stupid, in fact) to have placed all of one's eggs into the same basket, so to speak.

You ever notice how artificial banana flavoring tastes NOTHING like bananas? I mean like not just a poor imitation, it's like nothing alike. It's because most of those old formulas were based on the Gros Michel. If even one of those artificial flavors is a close imitation, good riddance. *blech*

I think I'd argue the opposite was the case. I'm currently lacking the mental prowess to put my arguments (or even thoughts) into words right now, though .

However, I will state that there's a whopping big difference between the amount of genetic diversity in a "traditional farmer's" crop of cannabis... and the (relatively very few) numbers that commercial breeders work with. You mentioned Ace Seeds - and I've read many reports about them, enough to know that this company is generally thought well of - so I'll use them: How many different mother and father plants, or alternatively, how many different ones are used in producing the seeds that they sell (per strain)? I know that they're said to use multiple parent plants for some (perhaps all) of their strains. But I'd guess that, realistically, this number (again, per strain) is a pretty small one.

When I think of a "true IBL," I imagine a field - or maybe even several of them - in which a fair number of plants were allowed to be open-pollinated (by other examples of the same strain). And by "a fair number," I don't mean three, six, or nine, lol - dozens, at least. On the other hand, I expect that most commercial seed production runs use clones of the same basic small set of parental plants.

I might be a bit naive on that, IDK.



<NODS>

I can think of a number of animals that have basically been "bred out of existence," due to what I call the "mutt syndrome." There seem to be some parallels here.



From most of what I've seen, "new genetics" is defined by a bunch of pollen-chuckers taking two of their competitors' strains, crossing them, and selling the results as the latest & greatest to the unwashed masses . Often (usually?), this appears to be done by growing out those other strains' seeds... F₁ x (different strain) F₁ = Unstable Phenotype Nightmare.

The market has a large degree of responsibility here, IMHO. The sellers' resources are finite, so it does tend to make sense that they concentrate on traits that sell more product. HIGH potency, visible trichomes, f*cking purple crap, et cetera. Quick-flowering, too, of course. Blah blah effity fookin' blah.

Of course, when the overall average profile of their customer base sort of works out to be comparable to a half-wit... does the seller then have some responsibility to help protect their industry - and, ultimately, their customer base! - from itself, lol? IDK.



I'd like to see some where they grew out acre-sized grows per strain - but using a large number of different parental plants - when producing seeds of that strain. Or at least gymnasium-sized grows. In combination with a way to guarantee that, in a ten-seed (package) purchase of those seeds, that no more than two came from any one particular set of parents (and one per would be even better).

THAT was one benefit (and about the only one I could envision that'd actually (positively) affect me in any way) that I had hoped would come to pass because of all the (various types of) legalization events that have occurred in this country since the good citizens of California first decided that cannabis should be considered a viable medicine.

I really should have known better, huh?

Personally, if I could make my cannabis seed purchases by sending $130 (or whatever) for a ten-pack to General Delivery, Malawi (et cetera) and know that some local farmer would get the request, pick ten seeds from his seed stock, and ship them off to me. I expect that the farmer would much appreciate this form of seed-buying, too . FFS, if we paid the poor SOBs in Columbia what we pay seedbanks for "Columbian Gold" seeds, it'd do wonders for their standard of living (probably wouldn't hurt the crime statistics down there, either).



Hey, at least (I assume) no one has thought for a few moments and then replied that... they're pretty sure... It's that awesome strain called 'Dro.



Girl Scout Cookies. Diesels. OG "Kush." Whatever the current purple strain of the day happens to be. Et cetera. Ad infinium. Ad nauseum.

<YAWN>

Just generic dope, IMHO.



LMFAO, thanks for the chuckle. I guess if someone has two joints, but only one brain cell, they might believe that kind of stuff (reverse the joints to brain cells ratio, though, and "might" becomes "won't"). Thankfully, we know that all it takes to "spread mites" is to walk from point A to point B, lol. And that most mites have pretty voracious appetites (and breeding cycles) - and, therefore, no specific engineering is necessary.



Yeah, I remember the US DEA efforts involving paraquat from about 1975 onwards. But they've gone at the problem from both sides, methinks. Direct eradication efforts - but the D also appears to have been instrumental in getting ol' David Watson (aka Sam the douche bag Skunk Man) set up in business in the Netherlands back in the day. Next time y'all hear a couple of brainiacs discussing the possibility that there are government-produced cannabis mites, lol, drop that little nugget into their ears. . . .

The point of mentioning Girl Scout Cookies specifically is because precisely because of the typical, purple, kush-like, cluster-buds of generic dope you're talking about. This has been determined by the market you also talk about as what is "desirable" so the people who are growing pot commercially, who don't give a lick about breeding, are just pollen-chucking as you describe, and then applying an extremely rudimentary, "Grow what looks like what I want," type of selective breeding programs to produce maybe F2 lines and calling that "breeding".

Ace is a little bit better, if you take a look at their breeding packs, they trace back what the maternal and parental lineage are, but they typically stop with things like "Panama Goddess #10" or "Malawi Killer", which they've selected out of family lines. I think from an intellectual property standpoint, the reason for Ace to do this is that they don't particularly want people to be able to just pollen-chuck their plants and re-create their strains, but with the breeding packs they include the pollen and seeds from parental lineages to do actual proper breeding projects to re-create their strains--but they also charge a pretty penny to do so.

Anyway, harking back to the generic bud, that all tends to look the same, go purple, etc. If you think about the Southern Corn Leaf Blight, that's where that kind of thing becomes dangerous instead of just annoying. Because for all we know, the same genotype that is responsible for this tight cluster of generic looking purple dope, might end up being highly susceptible to the next new blight. That's what I was getting at with the conspiracy theorists idea of the mites being specifically designed to attack cannabis. They feel like it must be being engineered in some way because it attacks "all these different strains" but in reality all of their 12-24 strains are all some Cookies or OG Kush derivative that is only different by a few chromosomal patterns, but universally tasty looking to mites. You could apply the same concept to molds, viruses, etc. The point being is they're assuming a false level of diversity, despite seeing all the indications of dangerous levels of uniformity.

Disappearing landrace strains is a problem but it will take a lot of time. Then cannabis left to her own devices to revert back eventually from all the mucking about with the genetics humans are doing.

All we have to do is look to what humans have done with other plants like Wheat and tomatoes. Tomatoes are very telling as humans took plants and turned them into a tomato plant from something different. Wheat we took advantage of a polytaxy version (mutation breeding) of it and bred that and let go of many of the traditional strains.

Wheat is traditionally produced with landrace strains. By "traditionally" NOT by Europeans or western world. The traditional method is to cross the landrace strains and run them 10 generations... then they call it done and release the seeds like that.

How many cannabis cultivators are doing it this way? There are a few breeders out there. Why I'm looking for them and buy up the seed if I can.

All this breed "selection" we are doing in the last 30 years or so with cannabis, the net result is less genetic diversity. This type of selection I think is market driven.

The proper way would be not market driven but culturally driven - meaning we select for disease/pests resistance and overall health and try and blend in the other properties we like say higher THC and terpines. Interestingly the terpines may go hand in hand with disease/pest resistance. Surly NOT to attract humans, we are the ultimate "pest" for these plants. chop chop....

I think what concerns me with the idea of disappearing landrace strains and what that entails, is that it's a process which may be pretty heavily effected by climate change. If we want to continue to pull in other agricultural industry examples, then the wine industry has read the writing on the wall. Their grape cultivars grow the best wine grapes at a certain temperature range, and they know that in 10-20 years, that temperature range is going to slowly migrate north. In my state they're buying up land in a northern direction because they know that's where their optimal temperature zone is going to go.

Well, if you think about how the temperature effects wine grapes, it's because it alters the sugar content of the grapes. Similarly, what effects might a change in temperature have on cannabis? If you have a variety like Panama or Malawi that's grown at one latitude, then what happens to that variety when the average temperature of that latitude drops? Do the Panama and Malawi varieties stay the same? I really don't think so, and along with gene pollution, eradication efforts, just good old climate change means that cultivars like Panama Red may have been a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon that we might be lucky to see repeated again somewhere else at some point, and then again may never reoccur.

I think that's why preservation is key, and again harking back to the corn blight example, it can save our asses in more ways than one. For corn growers, if they hadn't had earlier cultivars to work with then that could have been the end of corn growing in the south, but realistically corn itself probably wasn't really at risk. On the other hand, if you look the type of cannabis we as medicinal or recreational users want, then I think if we some how bred a dangerous level of uniformity into the high-THC cultivars that are out there, that we aren't prepared at the same level. There's only a handful of people preserving old-school genetics, and beyond that thanks to the clandestine nature there's no real way to track where such a susceptibility may have been introduced into the gene pool.

But back to apples....

What I fear is that the way the apple industry has transformed in the 20th century could represent what lies ahead for cannabis. There's still some specialty apple breeding, but there's often legal fights involving intellectual property rights, and then when they eventually get to market there's sometimes rarely more than a few varieties on store shelves. I don't know that many people can even name more than six apple varieties, and I've read somewhere before that before the turn of the 20th century, there was probably somewhere around 20 thousand cataloged varieties grown by private orchardists. Cultivars like Red Delicious ended up taking over in popularity because growers liked how well it took to different soils, it had high yields, etc. Then others like Golden Delicious just had super high yield, good transportability, etc. And now they're working with GMO apples that don't brown up... Because that's needed. *rolls eyes*

So I don't really mind pollen chuckers spinning out a new "strain" and calling it gold, if there's a sucker there to buy it then who am I to fault them. What I really worry about is the now flourishing legal industry not embracing good agricultural science and market practices, and making the same mistakes

 

[Graytail]

Reading through these posts, the thing that keeps coming back to me is the inherent complexity of cannabis. In my own garden, I've seen a strain completely change from the mother to its clone. The mother was short with wide leaves, which began to thin and stretch as it grew in my environment. Its clone was thin and stretchy from the start. I think that if we left cannabis alone for 100 years, it would adapt itself to each environment again, and would become even more diverse from all the gene mixing.

There's also the claim that there is no separate indica and sativa, merely environmental adaptation. It's a very adaptable plant. So I think it's entirely legitimate to work within a population of the same landrace. Years ago, I was able to start 80 individual Colombian bagseeds and work them down to the best phenos. I'm sure there were some traits in the losers that we might have wanted to preserve, but the winners were well worth discarding the rest. They were the best that stand of landrace cannabis had to offer. We strictly cloned so we never tried breeding. I have no confidence that the winners were stable anyway, coming from a group like that.

That's what I'm always looking for - the best plants in the landrace stands.

 

[MagicJim]

The market has a large degree of responsibility here, IMHO. The sellers' resources are finite, so it does tend to make sense that they concentrate on traits that sell more product. HIGH potency, visible trichomes, f*cking purple crap, et cetera.

Girl Scout Cookies. Diesels. OG "Kush." Whatever the current purple strain of the day happens to be. Et cetera. Ad infinium. Ad nauseum.

<YAWN>

Anyway, harking back to the generic bud, that all tends to look the same, go purple, etc.

The point of mentioning Girl Scout Cookies specifically is because precisely because of the typical, purple, kush-like, cluster-buds of generic dope you're talking about.

All this purple talk. I was looking at old photos this morning and the last greatest purple plant I grew was a landrace indica....Pakistan Valley. Just saying....

 

[Pennywise]

So true, the colors have to come from someplace in the gene pool. My Pakistan Chitral Kush x Erdpurt went purple on me.

 

[Van Stank]

 

[TheFertilizer]

All this purple talk. I was looking at old photos this morning and the last greatest purple plant I grew was a landrace indica....Pakistan Valley. Just saying....

It's not really picking on purple plants, at least in my eye, but really just commenting on what the current trend-of-the-times is in terms of what traits people are trying to recreate. I think the same has been done with some of the more favorable bud structures as well. It has just neared us more and more toward a monoculture because people are basically just using established strains to make crosses and then releasing those out to the wild as if they have any new genetic contribution, when in reality they're just a reshuffling/resampling of a narrowing gene pool. I think picking on one particular attribute like color might be too broad, so that's why I picked on Girl Scout Cookies as a strain since that's a little more narrow, but a perfect example of what I mean. There's like a faux-variety that's created by all these GSC crosses and derivatives, and they're all slightly nuanced enough to provide variety, but are all mostly the same.

 

[andIhalped]

A limited stock of strains to begin with doesn't necessarily mean that the genetic viability can't become more diverse over time with open-pollination.

Possibly. But it's fair to say that essentially no one is doing that. Nor are there widespread feral strains on this continent that can contribute to open-pollination.

Like any other plant, commercial cannabis is a but a part of command/control ag.

I think it's fair to say that commercial growers do not want & would not tolerate high level of genetic diversity, which would result in a high variety of phenotypes, including highly variable flowering times, height, nutrient uptake, water use, yield, quality, etc.

Larger scale commercial agriculture requires homogenized plants for homogenized consumers.

As Aldous Huxley noted: civilization rests on manufactured certainty, which necessarily results in a war on nature.

 

[GrizzWald]

Those commercial growers that are growing from seed?

 

[bobrown14]

All this purple talk. I was looking at old photos this morning and the last greatest purple plant I grew was a landrace indica....Pakistan Valley. Just saying....

Black is the new purple.

I guess since its a GSC variant .. it doesn't suck. Stacks up nicely beside a nice long cured landrace sativa:

Buffalato in red (soon to be black) next to Durban Gold (Durban x Panama Gold)

Something to be said about the new stuff. Will it stand the test of time??? Thats my measuring stick. How about Chemdawg? Been around a long time still a fav of many many, specially growers.
Blue Dream another poly hybrid. Best all time strain?? Could be.

Have we grown 100s of tons of it like the Colombian Red/Gold, prolly not.

DSC_0027 (2).JPG

• bobrown14
• Apr 4, 2018

IBL = In bred line.

So think more in terms of single clones, 1 plant reversed or part of the female reversed. Keep crossing them and selecting for "your" preferred traits.

Chose wisely.

With wheat they went with genetic mutants and replicated that for the best tasting bread. Apparently not for health of the folks that eat it tho! Food for thought. Maybe the selection was done when humans only ate 1 pc of bread a day and it got moldy and we ate it again the next day. hmmmm.... why do these people not get sick? No we throw moldy bread in the garbage. More FFT. Just throwing that out there.

For shits and giggles:

What would your preferred Cannabis traits be?

My #1 would probably be: Terpine Profile then Pest Resistance.

You know... some of the best of the best strains came from colab on the internet like we are doing now??

 

[bobrown14]

I think it's fair to say that commercial growers do not want & would not tolerate high level of genetic diversity, which would result in a high variety of phenotypes, including highly variable flowering times, height, nutrient uptake, water use, yield, quality, etc.

Shit.. there goes my growing technique. I've been paddling upstream it seams.

[QUOTE="andIhalped']

Larger scale commercial agriculture requires homogenized plants for homogenized consumers.

As Aldous Huxley noted: civilization rests on manufactured certainty, which necessarily results in a war on nature.[/QUOTE]


That ^^^

Used to think civilization depends on something more, like love (It may still).

But then "our" civilization is dead set on self annihilation. We are practicing this process every day. Thankfully cannabis is actually and could possibly be a "cure" for violence very similar to a "cure" for opiate addition. Our government, maybe they aren't looking for any "cures", just greed and money.

Hey: something to think about.

 

[Conradino23]

I don't think what happened to wheat in the last 200 yrs or so is a good analogy to how weed's been bred for the last 50 yrs, cause, but at least it's a jumping-off point.

About wheat:

Little attempt was made to improve the varieties of cereal crops until the early years of the 19th century. The crops grown at this time consisted of a wide range of ‘land races’, each of which had evolved in the area where it was grown, mainly through natural selection, assisted from time to time by selection by farmers of the better ears from their crops as a source of seed for future years.

More reading here although you'd have to pay to get a full article: History of wheat breeding

Anyway, wheat breeding that started around that time had two objectives: maximising the yield and raising the resistance to parasitic fungi such as Fusarium ear blight (FEB).

Check this article, that explains how wheat was bred from a diploid varieties to tetraploid and hexaploid ones (the set of chromosomes has been changed). Popular tetraploid wheat is for example durum, which is grown all over Italy, cause it makes a great pasta

The History of Wheat -

But the only quantitative consequence was higher yield. Studies on protein content throughout the ages are somehow inconclusive! Genetics acquired this way tends to be homozygous though, which is exactly what we don't have in cannabis genome, which is largely heterozygous. To break it down, homozygous genotype means the line is stabilised, all plants look exactly the same, and in heterozygus line you're gonna have many genotypes, which is our bread and butter if you grow from seed.

This is what sets cannabis apart from other commercial crops. I'd like to think the closest one genetically is hops, but in market sense we have to look up to grapevine IMO. There's no big philosophy here. We bred unstable lines with each other since Sam the Skunkman created Skunk #1, cause it was illegal and there was no science in it. Also you were trying to make something feasible to grow for yourself and your buddies and once the money started rolling in you only adjusted by making more seeds! That's it really!

But every stick has two ends, so in the process of destabilising the genome, making it prone to mutations, weakening acquired systemic resistance, spoiling it with high levels of nutrients etc. we created enormous amount of chemotypes, that appealed to our senses. But there is a downside to it again since every line consists of hundred different genotypes, we have to go through a pile of seeds just to find the right cut and it's very time-consuming as you know very well, especially if you work without a lab!

Landraces on the other hand are much more stabilised due to natural selection, but also due to human inbreeding in their native terroir and if you look at DNA sequencing of Colombian Gold in Phylos Galaxy you're gonna clearly see that it's one of the most stable strains out there! No modern hybrid really comes close, which is a great asset to us, cause it means we can bring it to full homozygosity quite quickly, and then by inbreeding with another stabilised landrace, we can create a text book F1.

That's another step for cannabis breeders, which will become necessary as soon as cannabis becomes legit, commercial crop!

 

[Pennywise]

Sourcing legit Santa Marta is my problem right now, no one seems to have it available at the moment.

 

[Conradino23]

Alchimiaweb still has it in stock

 

[Pennywise]

Ahh sweet, I’ll be looking today for sure! Thanks Conrad!

 

[Pennywise]

They don’t ship to the US, bummer!

 

[lazyfish]

Yes and with Hops and Grapes and Apples - same as cannabis - if you have a great plant that you want to grow in a uniform crop then each variety or strain needs to be cloned.

Nice discussion going on here,

Cheers,

 

[TheFertilizer]

One thing that I've learned about apple orchardists is that they plant their crop with about 10% of "pollinizer" plants, because in apples a cultivar is sterile to itself. So that means a Golden Delicious apple tree can't pollinate another Golden Delicious apple tree. All the propagating is done asexually because of that, but they found out early on that loss of vigor, genetic drift and mutations quickly cropped up, so they added the pollinizers as a way to create new varieties, but also kind of "reset" the genetic material of old cultivars. A lot of the time the pollinizers they use will be "wild" varieties that are heartier and more robust, trying to strengthen the line.

It's interesting though that with apples you kind of have a built-in need for an eventual crossing out the same you do with cannabis . We can try to clone a line forever, but eventually genetic drift will catch up and you will have things like mutations crop up, and if not that then epigenetics will eventually change the makeup of the strain too.

Like conradino was saying we have lines now that have been basically been pampered by tailor fit environments, what would they do if they were thrown out into the wild with landrace varieties? I wonder if they would pollute the gene pool with their weak shit, or just be out-compete by the plants more adept at surviving in that location. I suppose it depends, because if there were a line grown indoors that was accustomed to a climate like that at the equator, but selectively bred to uptake nutrients like nobody's business, would it out-compete the native variety in Panama or would the native Panama variety out-compete it?

It makes me think of the stuff guerrilla growers use to grow out in the national forests here. The odds are most likely it was from seed brought from somewhere else, but after literally 20-30 years of them growing it out in these forests in a different climate, I always wondered how much it had changed from what it had originally started as.