Talk:Landrace conservation

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Discussion for: Landrace conservation • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Landrace conservation covers the conservation of crop landraces in general: early proposals, what is being kept, inventories, how loss is measured, farms and gardens, stored samples and where cannabis appears in this work. Definitions of a landrace and how one is maintained belong to Landrace Cannabis. Measures of loss belong to Genetic erosion. Reserves and farms belong to In situ conservation. Storage and regrowing belong to Ex situ conservation. Holdings by number belong to Gene bank. The overview of the plant itself belongs to Cannabis conservation.

Data verification

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Discussion

Sources

• Veteläinen, Negri and Maxted (eds) (2009), European Landraces: On-farm Conservation, Management and Use: chapters by Negri, Maxted and Veteläinen (introduction); Maxted, Veteläinen and Negri (inventories); Heinonen and Veteläinen (Finland); Strajeru, Ibanescu and Constantinovici (Romania); Smekalova (Russia); Veteläinen, Negri and Maxted (strategy).
• Raggi, Spataro and Negri (2024), Biodiversity and Conservation 33: 2709–2738; Negri (2003), Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 50: 871–885; Jarvis and colleagues (2008), PNAS 105: 5326–5331; Ramirez-Villegas and colleagues (2020), Diversity and Distributions 26: 730–742: on-farm work, surveys and gaps in collections.
• Camacho Villa and colleagues (2005), Plant Genetic Resources 3: 373–384; Zeven (1998), Euphytica 104: 127–139; Casañas and colleagues (2017), Frontiers in Plant Science 8: 145: definitions and what a definition does.
• Maxted, Magos Brehm and Kell (2013); Bellon and colleagues (2017), Evolutionary Applications 10: 965–977: the general frame.
• Clarke and Merlin (2016); McPartland and Small (2020); Welling and colleagues (2016); Bachir and colleagues (2022); Chouvy and Afsahi (2014); Chouvy (2024): cannabis.

Who is making the case

The 2009 volume is written from inside the field and states its aim, which is to promote on-farm conservation with a stored back-up. Its authors call landraces the most threatened element of plant genetic resources and in the same chapter say that the data are few and seldom rigorously quantified. The same volume credits modern cultivars with real gains in yield, and Zeven treats the replacement of landraces as something that follows from a crop's economic importance and breeding effort.

The Moroccan trial of 2024

The report of 11 March 2024, from L'Opinion and republished by Morocco's agricultural research institute, rests on the word of the cooperative's president and notes that the agency had not yet confirmed the news. It describes a pilot of about 30 hectares. TelQuel's report of August 2024, written with the state news agency, gives the seed and cooperative figures.

Selection

Zeven writes on p. 129 that no or only limited human selection is carried out to maintain a landrace, and on pp. 136–137 that selection has had a great influence and that its intensity ran from nil to quite strong, with little recorded. The two passages pull apart, and neither makes mass selection the defining mechanism of a landrace. The page on landraces sets them out.

Numbers of named landraces

The figures from Chiloé and Ethiopia count names, and Negri and colleagues warn in the same chapter that names may not follow genetic differences. The Chiloé table comes from Ochoa (1975) and the Ethiopian count from Tsegaye and Berg (2007), both given here as Negri and colleagues report them. Ratios such as Hammer and colleagues' 72 per cent belong to the page on genetic erosion.

Hemp in the inventories

The Romanian table lists Cannabis sativa in six counties and ten villages between 2000 and 2008, while the text of the same chapter speaks of one old variety found in cultivation in 2008. The chapter does not reconcile the two, and it gives no earlier hemp figure to set against them. The place appears there as Grosii Tiblesului. The Russian chapter says that it is almost impossible to find landraces of industrial crops there, gives no count for hemp and does not say how many hemp landraces the collection holds. The Finnish chapter says that hemp was requested and does not report any hemp samples among those tested.

Clarke and Merlin say both that "the majority" of landraces are no longer grown and that "the vast majority" may already be extinct. Neither statement comes with a count. Comparisons of one area at two dates of the kind made for potato, wheat or maize have no cannabis counterpart among these sources; the overview page sets each report beside what supports it.

Whether a programme exists

Reviews of cannabis genetic resources describe no on-farm project for the plant, which is a statement about those reviews. The Moroccan permissions for the local variety have stated aims of supply and of help to growers, and the page on in situ conservation gives them.

Bere and the picture of Chiloé

Raggi and colleagues name bere barley in Scotland among landraces tied to a territory. The Chiloé photograph shows potatoes on display at Castro in 2008; its source does not name the varieties.