a problem with landrace breeding

[littleminnie]

LOL. Well I can't do math either. I made some claim on a CSA forum about how many shares you would have to sell to make $20000 a year or something and I was a decimal point off so it was way less shares than I had estimated.

I have found this thread to be very interesting.

[steev]

The corollary of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is "If it works, don't mess with it".

[raymondo]

I was at one time obsessive about maintaining purity of heirloom lines. After some years here I'm leaning more towards a Joseph style of seed saving, prompted in no small part by living in a more restrictive climate than most of the rest of the country. I now have a collard/kale mix I like a lot and the beginnings of a green-fleshed melon mix. I'll be gardening in a quite different climate this time next year and am keen to take what I have and adapt it there.

[will]

It's great that there are both heirloom lines and the many cultivars of grex, landrace, synthetic population, inbred, outbred, and hybrid varieties; Especially when it comes to maize. If it were not for divergent pressures and selection, and random mutations and recombinations maize would not be nearly so remarkable or mutable.

That dave christensen fellow compiled a population of rare varieties and kept at the selection process for 30 some years and that maize now feeds people on 6 continents. Had those ancient varieties been kept separate they would have probably suffered a great deal more inbreeding depression over those years if dave was one of the only people growing them.

My story is less epic and I simply had to compile a few selections to maintain genetic variety in a backyard seed saving project or concede that i simply did not have the space for a high selection pressure breeding project. Now i have 300 plants in two climates without much intact history of regional heritage corn seed. Maybe one day I'll have a contender.

Anyhow.. corn.. it takes all types. [anybody got a line on some orange endosperm maize?]

[mountaindweller]

I have only a backyard and like very much the style Joseph does the things. The conservation lobby put me off from saving seeds for several years because everything seemed to be so difficult. Even though seed saving ties up some precious garden space (my netted space).
Raymondo, gardening up there is so different, you will have to learn how to cook gourds and other strange things and grow tomatoes in winter isn't that weird? You will harvest papaya, mango, and acerola cherries.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

To follow up on the highly localized nature of pollination. I planted a patch of white popcorn this year. It was immediately next to a patch of regular colored popcorn. Also, there were a few kernels of off-type corn that got planted in the white patch. Most of the cobs in the white patch remained white. Occasionally there were a few off-type kernels.

Purples, reds, and yellows are dominant over white in corn. So any kernel with color originated with pollen that came from a plant with colored kernels.

Here is what one of the off-type cobs looked like that grew in the popcorn patch, and what a cob looked like that grew 3 feet away. There are so many variables to confuse the issue that I am ignoring, but this pattern was common among all cobs in all parts of the patch... I took lots of similar photos. This is a typical example.

[reed]

Feb 9, 2014 23:21:55 GMT -5 gilbert said:

I admit to being sentimental. And I have an uncomfortable feeling every time I hear of some variety going extinct; who knows what locks we just lost the key to. But I realize that this is not equally important to everyone, and that two hundred years ago, nobody was worried about it. And yet those same people created the diversity we are loosing today.

I agree sort of. When a species goes extinct that is a terrible thing but I don''t think it is the same with a variety. If I had the last Ky Wonder bean and the last Rattlesnake bean on earth I would plant them together and hope they crossed. If they did I wouldn't consider either to be extinct.

It doesn't  make sense to me that hundreds of varieties of each thing existed in nature, there were just a few natural ones evolved probably into a few somewhat different varieties based on geography or what critter did or didn't eat them.  When people started planting instead of gathering un-natural selection kicked in. Two or tree hundred years ago a few of those "people selected" varieties got distributed to different places and through both natural and human assisted selection became still more different varieties. One pioneer family for example went to Kansas and took some beans. The ones that grew best got saved and replanted. Another family went to Michigan with the same beans and the same thing happened. 

Each set of geographic, weather and soil conditions acted as a genetic centrifuge with different things spinning out. 

Since I want to grow food in Indiana and I have never found a single variety of anything that I know spun out  here and since the weather and other conditions have greatly changed form the past and will continue to do so, I feel the need to make my own. Not just that grow now but that have the ability to adapt to continuing change including if I move.  I need genetic diversity for that.

The people who preserve the individual varieties are doing a wonderful thing I think and I am glad they do it but I think what they are really saving is the fragments of what was. I think what Joseph does in Utah and what I want to do here is gather as many of those fragments as possible, throw them back in the centrifuge and see what spins out for us. I think he is a little more scientific about than I am but that's OK, he doesn't seem to mind if I copy off of him. 

So, just my opinion, even if an individual fragment or variety is lost that's OK. So long as it is just lost back into the mix. 

[flowerweaver]

reed I couldn't agree more. I live three hours round trip from a grocery store. The pioneers who built this place did not have the luxury of going to one, and it's a shame that whatever they grew for sustenance for a hundred years was lost when farming became 'unnecessary'. The acequia that once watered the fields for which this town was named hasn't flowed since 1968 and many people don't care.

Because of the rocky alkaline soil, the feast-or-famine rainfall, and extreme weather events it now takes quite a bit of work to extract even a meager harvest from this place. The way I see it, only through bringing back genetic diversity through that centrifuge will farming ever be able to return to this land. And that is now my focus, too.

[12540dumont]

You also need to be nice to yourself. If the major weed on your farm is Queen Anne's Lace, saving your own Carrot seed may not be the best use of your time. I have grex's and I have named heirloom varieties that I save. I also have seeds that I NEVER save. I figure I don't have to do everything, just most things.

I also keep part of the seed back when I plant. In this manner, if I change my mind about the direction a variety is going, I can begin again. I've also used this seed to check what a seed should look like, and to re-breed with something I have going. It also helps when something really stupid happens.

Saving seed from some plants, like broccoli is a pain in the butt. It's in the field too long. So, I only save broc seed every two years. Same with most of the biennials. If I need the seed, I grow them out. If there's a quart jar in the fridge, I don't bother unless I find something really fantastic.

I try not to lose too many things, but accidents happen. Irrigation breaks down, communication is lost, tractor driver had a hangover....Over the year's I've lost plants in crazy ways. Thank goodness I'm not in charge of all the genetics for any one crop.

I almost never save squash seed because I have too many planted and they are crazy out crossers. And I always save too much corn and bean seed.

[nicollas]

Humans does not self, and its F1 hybrids each generation ! It seems to work quite well

[reed]

It is just my theory and maybe totally wrong but I look at mixing varieties as also a way to minimize genetic depression in small populations. All my gardens together is about 2/10 of an acre and no way to water most of it. Even if I did have more space I don't have equipment except for a tiller, it has to all be done mostly by hand so it has to stay small and that means small populations of most things.

[flowerweaver]

Well, I am not yet into the stage of selection, I'm still working on survival of the fittest. This is a tough land out of which to squeeze any crop. Although, after incorporating a large gene pool followed by this unusually catastrophic spring maybe I can begin looking more at selecting for taste or color in things in 2015.

[Carol Deppe]

Re the bitter gene problem. I have not ever had a problem with it, so I asked Jim Myers, the vegetable breeder at Oregon State University about it. He says it's a dominant in the pepos that can come in from gourds. It's not a problem with the other species because we don't grow wild or bitter-carrying versions of those.

While the bitterness gene is dominant, you can't taste it until you have fruit, and the plant has been busy contributing pollen to the rest of the patch for a while before you have fruit. And in winter squash, since you don't taste those until after the season, if you caught a bitter plant it would have been spreading that gene throughout your patch all season. So even on a home scale it's not necessarily easy to get rid of the bitter gene. Joseph's method of tasting every fruit, culling all off-type plants, then removing all preexisting fruits is just what it would take to do the job. But in commercial seed production fields I think usually nobody tastes fruit from each plant at all, let alone at a stage where the situation is still retrievable. That is part of why it is so easy to breed better squashes than most of what we can buy.

I'm a big fan of freezing some seed of every variety you care about (after proper extra drying if necessary). When you do that you can be sloppier about isolation distances and numbers (at least when growing the seed just for yourself), as you can always go back to the freezer if your material gets screwed up.

Suzanne Ashworth's book Seed to Seed is NOT using info from the Oregon seed industry. Actually, she used pretty much the same sources I did when I wrote the "800 interesting plants" table in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties where I give isolation distances, breeding systems, incompatibility systems, and other info for most garden and many other crops. I give the references for every isolation distance, and they are from the professional literature representing mostly university breeders' information worldwide. I've talked with Suzanne Ashworth about it, and she used those same references, and actually included them in the original draft of her book. But Seed Saver's Exchange, the publisher, made her omit the references, saying it made the book too technical.

The isolation distances in Seed to Seed and in the table in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties are not overestimates or for producing foundation seed. They are, however, intended for general use in producing standard-grade seed to sell. They are actually in some ways underestimates. Universities have mostly been practicing chemical agriculture for decades, and many of them have fields that have few pollinators compared with what we experience if we grow vegetables on long-time organic soils near untilled meadows, woods, and wetlands.

There are all kinds of tricks you can use to cheat at those isolation distances, however. For starters, you don't need isolation good enough for anywhere in the world, just for your garden. And in some regions some crops cross readily and not in other regions. Common beans cross so readily here in my (organic) garden near a long-time wetland that if I want a cross I just interplant the two varieties. Every plant will produce some crossed seed. But common beans may virtually never cross in some regions. And much has to do with your intentions. Are you selling seed or just keeping it for yourself? Do you have some tucked away in the freezer as a backup? Are you growing a big field of something? In that case, you can get a good bit of isolation just saving seed from the middle; that may be good enough isolation even if your neighbors are growing the crop. (Peasants and Indians usually grew big enough patches of grain so that most came from the center part of the patch instead of the edges, so was "self-isolated." Many of the problems we have with isolation are because we are growing a few plants instead of whole fields of them.) Also, how large is the nearest patch? I don't usually worry about a potentially contaminating corn crop 1/4 mile away if it is just a garden patch, even for the crops I sell. I'd just save the seed from the middle of my patch (1/2 acre or more) and eat the edges. But if the potentially contaminating crop was a planting of hundreds of acres, that would be too much contamination for a crop I intended to sell. (But I probably still wouldn't worry about it if it was a crop just for my own use where I had frozen backup seed.) Also, some areas, there is a prevailing wind during the season and time of day when the corn pollinates, and all contamination is directional. You can plant two corns side by side, and only the down-wind one will experience crosses. In other fields (even in the same region) the wind varies enough so that you get crosses in both directions. If you have a consistent wind pattern, you may need to care only about other corns that are upwind. (If you have such consistent wind patterns, the ears on one edge of the patch will be nearly completely or completely unfilled.) I also get around many problems by focusing on corns that are so early that only Painted Mountain or very early sweet corn is pollinating in the same window.

The number of plants recommended in Seed to Seed is unavoidably arbitrary. If you are trying to maintain all the diversity in a very diverse corn, it will take growing many hundreds of plants, not the one or two hundred adequate for a corn with more ordinary amounts of genetic heterogeneity. But many heirloom varieties have already been genetically bottlenecked so much that there is little genetic heterogeneity left to lose. Where the variety is performing adequately anyway, it's because the combination of genes it has gives adequate performance even when inbred. Many big viney heirloom squash varieties have probably passed through multiple bottleneckings of a single plant or two. So while the squash are basically outbreeders, we have grown them to turn many of them into being fairly tolerant of inbreeding. If I'm growing squash for just my own use, I just freeze some seed, then grow whatever I need for eating purposes and hand-pollinate a few plants of those. If the material deteriorates I go back to the frozen stash and try again, taking more care about the numbers. If I'm growing seed to sell, and have bred the squash myself and deliberately created vigor-enhancing heterogeneity (such as with 'Candystick Dessert Delicata'), I grow the variety as the only variety of the species on an isolated farm, and grow at least about 80 plants. In this case, it's not just that I'm selling seed, it's that I'm the ultimate source for the seed for other seedsmen and seed companies. That gives you some idea of the range of legitimate choices--all the way from "whatever is handy" to serious numbers depending upon the situation.

[Carol Deppe]

littleminnie--Actually, the Seed Savers Exchange article is generally right that the contaminating genes will increase a lot in the next few generations in the heirloom they were trying to grow, though they were wrong to use the word "exponential." The problem is, most pure op or heirloom varieties are not as vigorous as the hybrid you get when you outcross them to pretty much anything. So for simplicity, let's imagine that I had 1% contaminating outcrosses in my seed. Now I plant them, usually 3 or 4 times as much seed as plants I want, let's say 4. Now, those plants germinate faster and grow much better than my op or heirloom. So none of them get thinned out. So now my contaminating plants are up to 4 percent. Such hybrids usually produce much more grain and much much more pollen than the heirloom. Let's say they produce 4X as much pollen and grain. So the next generation is 16% being a result of the contamination. The next generation, the seed resulting from the cross of the F1 hybrid and the rest of the field probably won't be quite so dramatically much more vigorous than the heirloom, but will still have a good bit of vigor-enhancing heterogeneity. Let's say that they get enriched only 3X during the thinning phase this year instead of 4X. So what is left after thinning is now up to 48% of the plants being grandchildren of the contaminants. And let's suppose that this generation they only produce twice as much pollen and seed as the pure heirloom. Now we're at 96% of our seed being great grandchildren of the 1% contaminated seed. At this point nearly every seed we plant is derived from the contaminants, and we probably eliminate approximately all of the remaining pure plants by thinning them out the next generation. Of course, with each generation, only half the offspring would get the GM gene (in the absence of selection specifically for it). But that still leaves us with a whole lot of GM genes in there. This is a worse case situation. But it's closer to reality than the supposition that the GM gene is not selected for. It is highly selected for even in the absence of using roundup because it is accompanied by the hybrid vigor also introduced in the outcross. (This kind of situation is called a "genetic sweep." ie, a gene that is not being selected for itself has its frequency greatly increased in the population because the gene came along with something else that was being selected for.)

If your variety is a very vigorous landrace or op variety, though, the bets are off. The outcross to the GM variety might not outperform the plants in the pure variety. Then you wouldn't be accidentally selecting for the outcross in thinning, and it might not make more pollen or seed than your home variety. The outcross might actually perform more poorly and get culled out right away.

[Carol Deppe]

Could someone tell me how to quote specific parts of someone else's post I'm responding to?