Comment by asdff

Comment by asdff a day ago

1 reply

You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their native environment or the modern farmer replacing these cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).

hosh a day ago

It doesn't take many generations for selective breeding to show improvements in landraces. Even just making sure that volunteers from seeds that were thrown out as food waste were given a chance to fruit and seed starts that process.

One of the more interesting sources of landraces can be found in local seed saving programs, such as ones hosted by local libraries. They are more likely to be viable seeds that is adapting to the local conditions.