Thanks for the response Jorgo..that certainly helps! There have been recent comments about how a ceed vendor was distributing fem ceeds to landrace farmers...really just trying to understand the long term genetic impact and having the working definitions that you provided helps with the overall context...I read where genetic diversity is a good thing but then I read where the vendor is "polluting" the pure strains with fem ceeds. Preserving landrace genetics seems wise but also planning for worse-case scenario seems prudent as well...ie how to minimize the overall impact of fem seeds on landraces.
This is a LONG discussion, but I'll try to make it as quick as possible; see below.
landrace & cultivar are words that go hand in hand.
Well, to be clear a "cultivar" ("
cultivated
variety") is basically any strain created and maintained by people. When it comes to cannabis, all or nearly all landraces are cultivars, but most cultivars aren't landraces. Get it?
Also i've always wondered about the term "pure" when applied to native types of herb.
The implied meaning of the term is that the plant in question contains only unhybridized landrace genetics. If you say something is "pure Afghani" you just mean that is has no other genetics in there except ones found locally in Afghanistan. Almost by definition, all landraces are "pure" and the term could also be used to describe any true-breeding (ie inbred) strain that isn't really a landrace.
when pollen is so damn small , can be blown on the wind, can travel miles & miles & miles , how is it that 100% pure indica (or sativa or afghan kush or lebenon red etc) is even possible?
Because of the effect of
populations. Being tongue in cheek here, this is a bit like asking why, if Irishmen can go anywhere they like on vacation, the country of Nigeria hasn't become red-headed!
Even assuming viable pollen can rise into the atmosphere, travel to another CONTINENT, and fertilize plants there, the genetic impact there is going to be absolutely minimal.
Let's say, purely for the sake of argument, that some pollen from one hermie flower on your Gudkarma kush floats out of your growroom, into a gulfstream, and lands right onto a young bud on a mountain in Afghanistan. So ONE CEED out of MILLIONS there will now have hybrid genetics. Even assuming this ceed germinates and develops into a mature plant, its still outnumbered a million to one, and its contribution to the local Afghani gene pool will be negligible.
Even assuming this plant were to propagate, there is simply no way your American drug plant is going to be as acclimated to the local Afghani grow conditions as plants selectively bred there for 2000 years specifically to thrive in that exact climate and pathogen mix. So your drug genetics are going to be working at a significant selective survival DISADVANTAGE to others, and the local genetics will quickly outcompete it.
The only probable way your "foreign" genetics will gain a foothold in the local genetics pool is if local farmers identify the new genetics, and decide to selectively maintain them. Realistically, probably not going to happen.
& dont get me started on those vids i see where arjan is passing out GH beans to local canna farmers.
I'm "getting started" on this now. Nobody who claims to want to preserve landrace genetics and who even has the foggiest idea how about actual genetics would EVER want to introduce foreign genetics into this sort of situation. There is absolutely NO good that can come of that, at least not from a genetic maintenance perspective, and the ONLY expected outcome is that there is some chance outside genetics get introduced into the local gene pool.
That said, how "bad" is this practice, really? The answer is "it depends". It mostly depends on what the locals DO with said genetics after Arjan jets back to Amsterdam.
As above, a small amount of foreign genetics introduced into a large regional gene pool aren't going to significantly alter the pool. Its just pure numbers. If I go to Kashmir and plant 100 "Sour Diesels" in one spot, that's probably not really going to do anything to alter the genetics in hundreds of thousands of other local hash-plants. Too few, and the outside genetics probably won't "take" very well in that climate anyway.
So if the locals grow out a few fem plants one season, even if there were a small amount of pollen "leakage" from hermies, so long as the locals don't deliberately try to breed with these plants, the impact on local genetics will be negligible, and likely zero.
The real problem comes if/when the locals decide that they like Arjan's stuff better than their own, or just feel like playing with the "new" plants, and then either deliberately hybridize their local genetics to his and select for hybrids, or (worse), just abandon their local landrace altogether and go entirely with outside genetics. If this sort of thing were to happen, within just a few generations, that kind of hybridization and selection could significantly and permanently alter a regions local gene pool. How probable this is depends on the genetics and area in question, but its not inconceivable that it could happen.
