How Do You Maintain A Landrace?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The current issue of Mother Earth News has an Interesting Article, that is closely aligned to this topic.

[jondear]

Feb 7, 2012 17:29:48 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

I might only save seeds from 50 plants each year, but I am planting seeds from many more mothers than that... Because I plant last year's seeds, and some 2 year old seed, and some 3 year old seed, and some seed from my collaborators and neighbors, and in some years seed from outsiders, so that by planting time a couple hundred mothers may have contributed seed.

With an annual, like corn, the number of fathers represented could be as high as the total population of my corn over the past 3 years, plus the total corn population of my collaborators and outsiders. Most of what I get from outsiders I consider to be functioning as clones.

With out-crossing biennials like carrots, I target 36 plants as my minimum. By the time I plant 3 years worth of seed that's 108 mothers represented in the landrace.

By the rough guessing method, I'd wonder if I should pay more attention to the biennials since the pool of pollen donors is limited. If I have 5000 possible pollen donors in the corn patch that seems like more than enough.

This post gave me an ah-ha moment.

[reed]

I would absolutely buy your book about land races.
But, in my vast experience (about a month) since I learned the term and started telling others I have developed a technique to get people to understand it. I just don't mention it.
I just say it's good to save your own seeds because after a while they get adapted to your garden. If we talk about heirlooms I say that they are just something that somebody grew and traded in some specific area a long time ago. Then I try to work in what a pain and expense it is is to try a different heirloom every year looking for that special one. Bad luck is often because that particular heirloom developed in some other climate and since it is kinda inbred, it doesn't have the genetic diversity to adapt to ours.   
Then I say if you like a particular thing just get as many different kinds of it as you can, plant them all together and save seeds from the ones you like best. Don't worry about if they mix up (I don't say hybrid), it won't hurt anything. It will just increase the genetic diversity and after a while you will have your own heirloom. 
If we do talk about pure varieties and hybrids I use my dog as an example. Her long and distinguished pedigree is - furry little black dog that herds chickens and eats rabbits, found by the road with none of the health problems common in pure breeds. 

[Joseph Lofthouse]

reed: Good strategy. Can you offer something for me to say when people ask about my landraces "Are these heirlooms?" Oh my heck. I am selling exactly what they are looking for (I think). But my varieties haven't been inbred for 50 or 60 years. So they walk away disappointed because of a label that I'm not willing to apply to my landraces.

[oldmobie]

Sept 2, 2014 9:05:32 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

Can you offer something for me to say when people ask about my landraces "Are these heirlooms?"

A) Not in the sense of producing identicle fruit year after year, but in the sense of consistently producing tasty fruit, that if properly maintained, is better adapted each year to the garden in which it's grown.

B) No, heirlooms are to fragile; if they're crossed with anything else, they're "ruined". A landrace, crossed with anything else, is still a landrace. Sometimes, it even emerges from a cross as a better landrace.

C) Not yet.

D) It's a "choose your own adventure" heirloom.

[jondear]

I'd say "No, I just picked them this morning".

[reed]

shoot, my code insert didn't work, I'll have to figure it out later

[imgrimmer]

I would say " It`s my own kind of heirloom, not very old but unique and well adapted to our climate here. Better adapted to our area then any other heirloom. You won`t find it elsewhere."
Okay your landraces are not heirlooms by definition but not far from that. 100 years ago all what was available for farmers where landraces. with a lot of variation in every kind. this is where all these heirlooms come from. they are only a extract of all the variation that was. all what yours lack is time... ( Unfortunately people think at this time was every thing at its right place and all was right and fixed since ever.... just the good old times )
I am sure this would work for Germany. The more local it is the better. and to say "you won`t find it elsewhere" is the final shoot

[blueadzuki]

Another problem I have with the "heirloom" concept is that is seems to imply that ALL heirloom are inherently better than anything modern; that the longer it has been grown, and the closer it is to the "original" (by which they usually mean somewhere between "wild" and "so old that no one can remember a time when it was NOT grown") the better it is. I think that is a bit shaky logically. Pedigree is not, nor should it be the one an only judge of how "good" a vegetables is, or how "healthy" (by the logic of that assumption, a truly wild bean that still had ALL of the toxic alkaloids it needed in the wild to protect itself, is somehow "better" for you to eat than the version we spend the last couple of thousand years breeding those toxins out of.), Granted there is something to be said for something that generation after generation liked enough to think it was worth keeping in circulation. On the other hand, some "rediscovered" strains probably were discarded not because of modern ag's "needs" but because the actual farmers found it not good enough. This is in my opinion particularly true with the so called "safari" heirlooms; seeds gathered from tiny hyper-isolated areas and brought back to the "modern world". While these are certainly great sources for interesting "lost" genes, I'm sure at least some of them are around not because the farmers thought them necessarily "good", but simply because they were SO isolated those strains were the best they had and they couldn't get better, or because agriculture was so shaky where they lived that anything that they could have a chance of eating was worth having a little around of (there is a difference between "famine food" and actual crop material.)

[reed]

Sales, Marketing and Public Relations as related to Landrace Gardening.



From reading on this forum and in my brief experience I think there might be a problem with getting people to understand and accept the concept of Landrace Gardening.



For me, I have gardened for a lot of years and with some exceptions bought seeds every year. In the past few I have moved away from that and want do so completely. I don’t have a large garden but am trying to expand. I need to find / develop things and methods to prevent genetic depression even though I can’t grow large populations. After finding this forum I now know that I need to develop, rather find melons that will grow in my soil. I really miss the ones I used to grow on the Ohio River bank, when I was a little kid I literally had melons hanging in trees.

Reading here I have learned that cross contamination from the GMO corn five miles away or the Queen Ann’s Lace down the road, are not as big a concern as I thought and that there even still is such a thing as a potato seed. I've never seen a potato fruit.  I've learned that I can have a smaller population of corn than I thought because it isn't inbred to start with.



What follows is just some ramblings that might even be contradictory at times, some of it might be just plain goofy. It isn't meant to be a plan or solution but I hope that from it, some of you might get an idea or steal a phrase that you can use.



Concerning Landrace Gardening

I don’t think people in general are quite ready for it and since unfortunately a lot of people have relatively short attention spans and less than stellar reasoning abilities, I don’t have time or the energy to waste on an educational campaign.

That being said, I don’t think I will try to develop or grow landraces, at least not yet. Instead I am going to grow NSVs (naturally sustainable varieties – there might be a better term than that but it’s what I have for now). Natural and sustainable are good words, people accept them positively and I don’t have to offer a definition. I can use these words without getting the “glazed eyeball” effect.


So what are NSVs? (or go ahead and use Landrace) They are highly diverse vegetable, fruit and grain varieties that lend themselves well to natural and organic production methods. They are highly adaptable to varying climates and soils and have the ability to naturally self adapt to changing conditions. They reliably produce highly nutritious harvests of superior flavor. They are well suited to home gardens, small market growers and CSAs. They are not suitable for large scale Agra-Business and could be thought of as the opposite of GMO. They are also not hybrids (hybrid as I understand it being the careful cross of two inbred lines).

They come about (I avoid saying developed, or breeding) from the natural reassembly of traits found in multiple open pollinated and heirloom varieties. We all owe a great debt to the non-profit groups and small companies who over the last few decades have worked to find and preserve the old heirloom varieties, keeping them safe from extinction or contamination from GMO. Without them our food production might have been completely lost to round-up ready, monopolistic profits. (I know but this is PR for the masses, throw the purists a bone, and it’s kinda true)



The chink in Heirloom armor (dealing with seed Nazis)

INBREEDING – If your confronted with a died in the wool purist or someone who thinks a cross (I don’t even say hybrid) and GMO are the same thing you might as well give up. But most people know what inbreeding is and that it generally isn't good. If you tactfully work it into the conversation you can probably plant a little seed of reason. Don’t be too hard on the first group though, because you can’t know for sure that their parents aren't siblings.



Direct Sales

A lot of you probably have more experience than I do at a farm market booth but if I read things right your hearts are in putting seeds in dirt, not sales. This is just common sense and you may already do it but try to develop an attitude (friendly but confident) that your product is the best because well, it is. You might already do this too but offer samples. Some nice chunks of melon on ice, little corn on the cob pieces you can drop in a steam pot nice and fresh. I might not be typical but if I came across that at a market the chances I wouldn't buy something is almost zero. PRICING – remember yours is better and should demand a premium over the commonplace. That might not work but lots of times people just assume higher price means better and when it really is that’s just gravy. If you know of people who need help you can find an avenue for that too.







My Definition of Landrace (subject to change without notice)

A species of vegetable, fruit or grain who’s genetic makeup consists  of traits carried in numerous open pollinated and heirloom subspecies, reassembled by natural means into  into a single non-inbred cultivar capable of adapting and thriving in a wide range of climatic conditions.

[reed]

Joseph Lofthouse  I have another idea, if they ask is it an heirloom? Tell them no, not exactly. It's more like a species, a more natural state than an heirloom. Like it was before named varieties.  

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Today I had good results with saying, "No they are not heirlooms. They are survival-of-the-fittest tomatoes. I planted over 400 varieties of tomatoes, including many heirlooms, and allowed them to cross pollinate, and these are what grow best on my farm."

Or alternatively: "They are my own variety that has been selected via survival-of-the-fittest to thrive on my farm."

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Sept 2, 2014 9:05:32 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

reed: Good strategy. Can you offer something for me to say when people ask about my landraces "Are these heirlooms?" Oh my heck. I am selling exactly what they are looking for (I think). But my varieties haven't been inbred for 50 or 60 years. So they walk away disappointed because of a label that I'm not willing to apply to my landraces.

haha. I'd say: "no, they are better than heirlooms, both in taste and in how well they grow"

Or tell them they are "modern heirlooms". Whatever that means. Lol.

In regards to the term landrace, i recently heard the term "evolutionary breeding" being thrown around on the internet. It seems people are creating modern landraces for adaptability of things like wheat and having great success, but they are calling it evolutionary breeding inatead, which seems to fit andbe as good a term as any.