DNA have talked about this many times in interviews. There belief is the market for fem seeds would eventually decline and reg's would come back in demand.
This is interesting. Thanks for posting this.
Clearly there is SOME demand for regular ceeds; just more (in general) for feminized. I tend to think that with legalization coming (slowly) growers won't have to hide their grows so much, allowing more indoor and outdoor space for cultivation. With that there will be more ability to do gender selection, more interest in home breeding, and more interest in regular beans, just as DNA says.
They also believe regular seeds should cost more then fem's.
This I don't get. Did they explain what the reasoning is here?
IMO, in a legal free market fem beans should cost the same or maybe a little bit more than regs, because of slightly increased cost of manufacture and skill needed to make them. Double the cost (which is the current practice) is too much, and less than the cost of regs is too little.
I could maybe imagine a situation where demand for regs is so low, and requirement to maintain males so high that regs justify a *slightly* higher cost, but this would be a pretty unusual circumstance, and the premium here shouldn't be much. Back in the day when breeders actually tried to create stable lines, open pollinization was the norm, and because of uniformity, there was no need to maintain individual males to propagate a line.
If DNA is saying that simple S1s or F1s should cost less than actual worked lines, well, there I agree. IMO its lunacy for buyers to pay premium prices of $15-20 per bean just for easily produced and unworked S1s of "name" lines, but that's what's happening in some cases.
They are working on reg's for there strains but some will never be able to have true males as there parent(OG18,OG,SD,Kosher,ect..) are 2 females. They have messed up in the past and brought out strains in reg's seed like sour diesel but messed it up by using Sour Cream as the male and the results are not Sour Diesel, we all make mistakes and they seem to have learned not to do that anymore.
The first thing, I get. As mentioned above, if your "strain" is just a cross of two female plants, well. . .there are no regs to sell!
On the second thing, that's a question of marketing and quality control. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with selling Sour Cream x Sour Diesel, for example. The issue is how good is the cross in question and how are you marketing it.
If your line is bad, it doesn't really matter what you call it. . .its still bad. Some breeders actually sell stuff without rigorous testing, and that's a problem.
If the line is good, then comes the issue of how its marketed. With this particular example, I think there is plenty of room to argue about what constitutes "Sour Diesel", but if your plant is fairly UNLIKE the "clone only" plant that goes by that name, you probably shouldn't name your line after it!
Its easier to take 2 females that you have smoke tested and cross them together with a goal in mind to create something new then to take a tested female and cross to a male that has never been smoked. When's the last time you smoked some male bud....
Males don't really make buds, but good males from potent lines can make resin and have surprising potency. Last time I smoked a male was 15+ years ago, and despite what I just said, I still wouldn't recommend it, if you can help it!
Anyway, traditionally, all breeding was done the old fashioned way with males and females. If you're starting your breeding with actual STRAINS (ie inbred lines), not "clone only" mutt/polyhybrids then it doesn't matter if you use males or females, because they'll be close to genetically uniform anyway.
Clearly its easy to cross two females of known quality, lots of the "breeders" do this, and a few of them do almost nothing BUT this. The "issue" here is that all of the breeders of quality (and I include DNA here) claim that breeding with feminized se-eds is "wrong" and say they don't/won't do it. Why they say this is an open question for me, but I still do think there is something to be said about old school selective breeding.
