I'd buy that if anyone was winning cup after cup with in-line breeding, they aren't though. The people who win cup after cup are breeding polyhybrids or call them whatever you want, if the term isn't correct it doesn't really matter, A rose by any other name is still a rose. When you are crossing one landrace with another landrace it's "Something" right? So what is the correct term? IDK does it matter? The effects are the same.
What I have not seen happen is anyone winning with a true landrace that they have bred using in-line breeding. I could be wrong but someone would have to prove it to me by showing they get consistent winners. If in-line breeding is the way to go, where are the winners? Why are the best producing and most resinous and best tasting plants that win all the cups always what I call polyhybrids?
As for the green revolution of the 50's and 60's that again was what I call hybrids or polybybrids. Nevils SK#1 is case in point. Three strains crossed into one. Durban poison is the one landrace strain that has stuck around a long time but again, who's winning cups with Durban? They aren't but they sure win a lot of cups by using Durban as part of a polyhybrid cross. And as great as the original SK#1 was it's been left in the dust by newer crosses that moved further away from landrace strains into even more crazy crosses.
And yes I agree my breeding might not have been perfect but apparently the same is true of everyone because nobody is winning cups with in-line breeding that I know of.
Now if you are talking about creating a strain that is Commercial and works better because it's Uniform then sure that can be accomplished by in-line breeding. My strain would get far more stable and consistent yeilds when I had interbred. I've take a line to F16 how many of you can say the same? Yes they might have been great for commercial growers but like I said, they were not as potent or as vigorous and no matter how much I though I could get that potency and vigor to improve it never did. I'd cross F2 and F3's with F15and so forth and so on. The genenics of an in-line strain doesn't magically improve by breeding it over and over, all it does is become more stable and uniform. So OK, if you are breeding for a commercial grower looking for consistent yeilds and uniformity great. All the plants will be the same, you can use the same fertilizer on them, they will grow to the same height under the lights, etc. etc. But is that the way to win the next cup or create the next hype strain? Doesn't seem to be to me and that's my point. Are we breeding for the next big thing? Or are we breeding to make a uniform crop of what is OK weed? In-line breeding is a great way to stabilize and create uniformity, I don't buy that it's the way to create the next big thing, it's a way to take the "next big thing" and stabilize it, hopefully without losing what made it the "next big thing" in the first place. But who has created "the next big thing" with in-line breeding" Anyone???? And do we have evidence that over time the stability of the line will remain or will it slowly over time lose what made it the "next big thing"
I know this much. I've moved on from trying to create a perfectly stable line. Why? Because by the time you do get it stable the industry has moved on to bigger and better plants thanks to the work of people breeding the hybrids and creating more polyhybrids. It's even possible that my original strain was as good as when I started with it and that it simply seemed less potent because I was then comparing it with never and better strains that people were creating with hybrids while I was wasting my time fucking around trying to be the next Nevil, well Nevil's stain isn't that big a deal anymore and that's because people started breeding more and more different strains together.
Corn is a plant that the commercial growers value for size and uniformity over everything else. They used in-line breeding to creat large yeilds of unifor but incredibly BLAND corn. Guess what happens when you get into designer sweet corn for gardeners? Then it's right back into hybrids and polyhybrids that win the day. Go look up the most expensive sweet corn seeds and see if they were in-line bred. They aren't they are all hybrids.
I appreciate your response and totally agree with pretty much everything in it. I love what are commonly called polyhybrids, I like fems, but not autos, personally. Outcrossing/hybridizing totally has benefits, but you can dial in on specific desirable traits through a combination of line breeding and outcrossing. We don’t disagree hardly at all.
I agree that everyone has a different list of desirable optimizations, which is one reason why there are so many strains and breeders these days. There’s a diverse customer base with diverse preferences and the same is true of the growers. We are spoiled for choice right now.
Line breeding on a large scale for many years really does produce amazing results, very few have had the scale for a long enough time to produce the next generations of winners. This all assumes cannabis contests are 100% above board meritocracy-driven contests and not bald faced marketing events, which is not entirely accurate in all cases, let’s say.
If someone took some famous cut and inbred it, ran 200 seeds, selected the best plants from the next generation and breed those together then repeat the process for 12-20 generations of hundreds of plants, and selecting for desirable traits carefully they would produce something amazing and ‘new.’ The traits we consider desirable could be mere yield, or flavor, finishing time, or pest resistance, or all of the above. Corn growers in the decades past were after yield almost exclusively, but options exist because everyone has different preferences and the market retained some of the heirloom options.
It is very similar to how Asian tropical fish farms make new varieies in captivity, they cull tens of thousands of fish over dozens of generations and end up with crazy new colors, patterns and even morphology in aquarium species. I am ethically opposed to those fish breeders, but the selective breeding principles are the same, and yes you sometimes have to outcross to restore vigor, but in the case of cannabis it is not hybridization in the traditional sense. Hybrid vigor is a known phenomenon in fish and reptiles, too, I know it exists, I didn’t address it, but “varietal outcross” is a more accurate. A lot of business plans depend on “indica” and “sativa” and I am fighting an uphill battle in that sense.
PS: I also don’t begrudge folks selling their chucks, but I would love everyone to be educated on basic genetics and what they are really buying before losing money to scammers or marketing pukes.
We almost entirely agree on the important bits, cheers to what brings us together, bollocks to what doesn’t.
“Does it matter?” - that’s a good question.