I subscribe to a plant breeding model of ‘less is more.’ I prefer simple techniques, limiting the amount of selection I am making, and keeping each individual species limited to a single landrace rather than many different varieties (tuber crops are a bit different, where I make selections of interesting individuals from my landraces. I can multiply these progeny asexually while still maintaining the landrace as a seed crop). All my seeds are simply kept in a single jar: favas in the fava jar, dahlias in the dahlia jar, lettuce with the lettuce, and so on.
Because I highly value genetic diversity I regularly introduce new varieties to each landrace. If it lives it lives, if it dies it dies. Many crops have been bred into a situation where they are unable to cross-pollinate, simply selfing every generation and maintaining a lowered level of genetic diversity compared to their wild ancestors. As an example, tomatoes. Wild tomatoes have pretty, showy flowers that attract pollinators. They are diverse and resistant to disease and their fruits have a wide variety of unusual flavors. Domesticated tomatoes have small, pathetic flowers that are generally unattractive to insects and as a result genetic diversity is kept lower than it should be. As a result I try to maintain sexual promiscuity in my crops to maintain this diversity: I prefer plants with showy flowers that attract insects, allowing for crossbreeding between each plant and the interesting new genetics that result.
I’m not the first person to have this approach to breeding new food crops. The venerable Joseph Lofthouse (website here) wrote the book ‘Landrace Gardening,’ a bombshell of a gardening book that turns most conventional plant breeding principles on their heads. It’s the way our ancestors did it, and the method of plant breeding that we built societies on. Only with the industrialization of society and the turning of science to the needs of capital did we begin our deadly mechanization of agriculture, pulling people off the land and turning food production over to the machines and their operators. It’s not sustainable and we need to start doing better, even if we need to do it without the help of our universities and governments.
I work with the following species:
- Dahlias
- Potatoes