Yeah I’d say that all fits with the way I was using the term, except maybe for:
History is a subjective thing of course. But if a person or group of people spend time adapting a population over multiple crop generations to their land, then it has a history. Most landraces have a longer history. But everything starts somewhere. Like, most countries have a very long history, whereas some countries are very new. But they all have some kind of history, just some have a longer one than others.
As for grex, I think of a grex as a population all deriving from the same two original parents, like being siblings, where as a landrace can have potentially many more. Also my impression is that a grex might not have any specific adaptation to a particular land. So, very different from a landrace. And I would think that a grex might be a good population from which to start a landrace project, though I would rather start with something much more diverse, which I would tend to call a ‘hybrid swarm’. I’m not even sure of the strict definition of ‘hybrid swarm’, but I personally use the term to refer to a situation where one has made many F1s from many different parents, and then if possible crossed all those F1s (or maybe F2s or whatever if one wants to select a bit first) with each other, to make a richly diverse population. Welcome to correct me if I am wrong with the way I am using that term.
The kind of landrace I have been discussing is one where we’re trying not to homogenise too many phenotypes. But, my impression is that there can be quite a spectrum of this. Such that some traditional populations labelled by botanists as landraces, might still have some phenotypic variation, but way less than the approach I am advocating for, which some people might consider to be a ‘narrow range of traits’, though ‘narrow’ is of course a very subjective term. That’s my impression anyway but feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.
Actually, on that topic, in the video of Dr. Debal Deb, whose work is absolutely admirable, I did as it happens find myself wondering, when he was talking about the traditional method of maintaining rice landraces in India in the video I shared above. He was talking about a very strict method of maintaining them by selecting for… it sounded like pretty much all their phenotype traits! I couldn’t help wondering, is that really how they were maintained in pre-colonial India? Or has he perhaps been influenced by the more modern Western ‘heirloom’ trend which I have the impression is more fanatical about selecting against ‘off-types’. Like, it could perhaps be that the native Indian landrace culture really was that strict, and their landraces really were that homogenous. But at least that is not the level of strictness I get the impression some landraces were maintained with in other cultures where it seems to me they were more diverse, and more in line with what you just said about that. That part of his lecture did conflict with my own understanding of landraces in general.
By the way what is your source(/es) for your criteria?
I would qualify that by saying that it could do just that on the breeder’s land! Or on their and their neighbours land! That’s after all how so many of the ‘old’ landraces also came into being!
Of course this also brings into question, what about if I buy seeds from that breeder’s relatively new landrace, or for that matter, from a 1,000 year old landrace from some ‘exotic’ area straight from the indigenous people of that area - is it still a landrace now, in my fields? This could perhaps be merely a linguistic issue. But from one perspective, we might have to wait until it adapts to our land (if it does), to call it a ‘landrace’ again, at which point it might be then a new and different landrace! So perhaps we would have to say it’s ‘from’ a landrace until then.
But yeah, my focus is on making new landraces. The only crops I’ve grown ‘from’ old landraces are one tomato landrace from Colombia, and some rice landraces. Both for the purpose of breeding. I do hope to make a nice new rice landrace!
Another thing that comes into this is for example Joseph Lofthouse’s ‘landraces’. When they are community projects bred in various lands which are quite different from each other, I find myself not thinking of them as landraces at all, but rather, more as hybrid swarms. But the ones which are very much focused on his land, but with phenotypic variability considerably more than traditional landraces, I find myself unsure of what term to describe them by. But some of them I really can think of as landraces, really suited to his land and very successful there, often way more than any other variety there is, from the work he has done. But I see it as his kindness to deliberately keep the diversity considerably high specifically to enable the sharing of them over a wide spectrum of lands. So the aim overlaps with the traditional aim of landraces, but has that added factor of consciously wanting to share them over a wide area. in one way almost ‘proto-landraces’, or perhaps the ones bred communally in quite different places as ‘proto-landraces’ which do have some specific adaptation but are basically very highly suited to sharing for other people to use in starting their own landrace projects. But the ones more specifically adapted to his place but with a consciously shareable level of diversity, perhaps simultaneously ‘landraces’ and ‘proto-landraces’. Well anyway, all these labels are us humans just imagining conceptual boundaries in a boundless world. But anyway, there are some of my thoughts on it. It’s a rather uncommon thing to be deliberately making diverse populations to share with people, so no wonder the language isn’t quite settled!
