heres an interesting point.
some think mns are so good, but then you talk of tens of thousands of plants for breeding.
why would it take so many?
ive made some seeds, that while growing less than ten, have produced better plants than seed that has come from other breeders, even mns.
so if you were to breed with thousands of plants, you would expect the quality to be significantly better than what someone can do with less than 20 seeds.
now, to find those really special plants, even in mns seed, maybe you need to grow out thousands. what would your "best of a thousand" plant look like compared to the average of that strain?
so then the next step is breeding.
you found your plant, now you have to find a mate.
how hard is it to produce a seedline that carries the exceptional quality that you found in the original mother?
i would think that with enough effort, or maybe just luck, you could get that down in a reliable form.
has mns done this yet?
if so what strain?
Hey Jack,
That was certainly Nevil's goal, buyers could expect to find a keeper or keepers in every pack.
By all accounts he nailed it.
Back in the late 70's/early 80's, genetics were much closer to their field grown imported origins (extremely heterogeneous) , and growing out 5 or 10 seeds from 1st or second generation kind bud grown in the hills would usually yield some killer females that were easy to pick, but picking males that preserved the traits you wanted was very difficult. One bad male selection in a small outlaw plot could degrade a line forever.
I know, I did it
RCC's marijuana Botany helped a lot to understand what was happening, but the plants still had wild differences in genetics that made it very challenging.
These days, the narrowing of commercial gene-pools have resulted in extremely homogeneous lines that can make male selection easy for complete novices with 5 plants in a closet to pass themselves off as breeders.
Assuming Shanti is working with Nev's original F1 gear for many of his lines (many are built with F1 x F1 matings, like SSH) he would face big challenges creating the same famous hybrid lines if he lost one of the F1 parents.
Shanti posted many years ago that he had lost the NL5 HzC mother that he used for some crosses and selected a new one from preserved seedstock from Nevil's old selection run where the original was found. This is to his credit as he was attempting to stay as close to the original pedigree as opposed to making F2 of the hybrid and stabilize in F3 or later as much of his competition must do. They don't have the original hybrid stock to work with (except sensi who had other problems.)
At the same time, the product simply isn't the same but rather a completely different line, and to pass it off as the same is . . . not good ;-)
A case could be made that an S1 of a selection from Nev's original F1s of something like SSH could better produce better phenos than new F1's made with brothers and sisters to the original parents. It would certainly produce more consistent offspring (for better or worse depending on the selected mother) as the gene-pool narrowed dramatically and the plants would also undeniably be closer related to the original than a "re-imagined" line.
All of these details would be valuable to MNS customers trying to find and preserve their own ultimate plants.
As we get older, many of us start thinking about life in a strange way: "How many selection runs can I complete before I die?" The math is simple, and as our seed collections grow, we realize there is never going to be enough time. Wasting time on lines that will not help us towards our goals becomes a vital concern.
As far as Canopy etc. breeding better plants, that is not really their business model.
They will first try to lock out all competition through lobbying regulators and gain monopoly control of the market.
Once they have that, they no longer have any market pressure to improve quality or variety and also have complete control of the price.
Failing that, they will attempt to buy out competition or otherwise take them out of the game.
When prohibition of alcohol ended in the US, there were only a handful of legal producers allowed to participate in the new market. Even when it expanded with more large corps, it wasn't until the late 80's when small boutique producers were allowed to participate in the market, and it took many years before they were able to get space in the fridge at your local grocer. Today, the small guys have to partner with giant distributors to grow beyond "local hero" status.
So, when we say "regulate like wine" we are really saying "give it to giant corporations for 50 years and then finally let our kids play as tiny underdogs in the industry we built and preserved at the cost of everything we loved, our families, our wealth and our freedom."
Sorry to ramble so far off track.
Nev would like that people are still working with those old cuts after his death, and that his legacy is cherished and respected by those that come after him.
