The basic idea is an idea on how we can label our landraces so that others can take part in the landraces with us, know what traits you pick out, and try and do the same. As a note this is just a discussion to see if we can come up with something that helps everyone out.
Some examples:
Let’s say that you’re wanting a melon landrace. You want as much diversity as possible, but you want to make sure that it’s 1) resistant to disease and pests (at least until it’s finished going to seed), 2) great sweet flavor, 3) grows within your season, 4) is only yellow fleshed. When sharing out your seeds (or when making a landrace topic here) people can return the seeds to you if they agree to follow those selection criteria as well. In your topic you’d lay those out as the selection criteria for seed saving, and those joining in the project with you agree to follow those before returning seeds.
For our main seedbank we’d have similar labeling, though it’d be a lot more accepting at first (perhaps we’d end up splitting more landraces in the future as things grow). In general we’d only be looking for 1) resistant to disease and pests (at least until it’s finished going to seed), 2) has great flavor.
If everyone that listed a landrace added their acceptance criteria, explaining it as well as possible (with pictures if it’s complex) that would allow others to know if they want those seeds, and if they want to help grow it with you and join your little community landrace. That would also mean that people who join into the yellow melon landrace could return those seeds also to our more generic melon landrace so there’s be a hierarchy of sorts.
Thoughts? any idea on how to improve on this? does this make sense? Am I just being confusing?
I think it would be great for us to eventually have seed packets of a specific landrace from a specific gardener with specific selection criteria and local adaptation.
I think it also be very cool, and perhaps unique, to put together seed packets of multiple landraces from many gardeners that are all based on the same selection criteria. “Drought tolerant cantaloupes,” for example, or “yellow fleshed watermelons.”
I think that would be something really cool our community could create that wouldn’t be easily findable elsewhere.
What would we call such a thing? Mixed landrace? A landrace mix? Meta-landrace? (I’ll admit I like the idea of the last one because it sounds fancy, but the first two are more obvious in meaning.)
Should we merge this discussion into this thread? It seems like this may end up being part of the same conversation.
A passing thought, since I know you enjoy specificity: “disease” or “insect” may or not be the same pathogen across locations, I’m not sure how well resistance generalizes.
This paper is available for free to individuals if they log into the JSTOR website. If you are the kind of person who occasionally is interested in reading a research paper, my opinion is that this one is written in a relatively accessible way.
Traits providing perceptual distinctiveness (PD), which allow less commercial farmers in developing countries to recognize and name individual landraces, enable the creation and management of their diversity and the transfer of knowledge of each to other farmers and succeeding generations. Worldwide examples illustrate how PD traits on seeds and vegetative propagules help maintain genetic purity and provide markers at planting time, identifying landraces suitable for planting at particular locations and times and for future household and market needs. PD traits on the yield also enable household members and customers to identify and value landraces for different uses. To fulfill these roles, they are generally highly salient, restricted in number, environment-independent, qualitatively inherited, generally with expression based on one or a few genes, and often culturally significant.