What I have read is that in most cases what breeders have is a male plant or a female plant, or maybe several of whatever sex plant they have, but not both males and females so they cannot make beans but only use them for crosses. Something else I have read is that breeders who have one are reluctant to give up or loan or rent or lease their plant(s) or a clone or some pollen to another breeder who has a plant or plants of the opposite sex for breeding purposes because of, at the time of the article I read a couple years back, no breeder that has considered teaming up with another who has the opposite sex plant of the same type have been able to work out an agreement on company name and rights and profits both were satisfied with and would agree to.
An opinion that was given in what I read was that another possible reason is that if people today knew how potent the pot of the past naturally was it would make breeders today look bad and particularly because in the 60s and 70s you hardly ever ran across seedless pot so if those special landrace strains were that potent with part of their energy production going to make seeds instead of more THC how potent would they be today if grown for maximum THC production/seedless? They would make the best breeders look like amateurs was the given opinion and what breeder wants their customers to think that?
What would people think about breeders whose strains they bought for over $100.00 or maybe over $200.00 when they found a natural non-bred strain would beat what they paid so much for by a mile? Again that was only the opinion of the author of the article I read but personally I tend to agree with it.
If I had both male and female plants of whatever strain it was that my brother in law brought back from Vietnam and I made beans indica lovers would not trip over each other to buy it but true lovers of sativas would pay almost any price for it once they knew how unimaginably potent it was.
Most of the people today have been programmed and propagandized to believe that the best of the best has only come into being through cross breeding when at least in the case of sativas, possibly indicas too but I am not much of a fan of them so I will not speculate about them, the very best of the best came from Mother Nature and not through cross breeding.
Many early breeders screwed up royally by trying to increase yields and shorten flowering times and crossing some indica with the sativa they grew that was fantastic and ended up with a mediocre cross at best. Some did/do things to make what I call gimmick crosses that have some spicy taste or sweet taste and they sacrifice overall quality for something that tastes yummy. Some breeders have done very well and created very good crosses but they havent topped Mother Nature in maximum potency. They have just come somewhat slightly close to matching potency and did it with crosses that do have shorter flowering times and fairly high yields but at the sacrifice of the type of pure high that many loved for so long and mixing in some percentage of body buzz.
When I think back to the very first time, and actually the first few times I grew I have to laugh. I had a couple cigar boxes full of beans of various types of the best sativas of the era and one early spring day I took a fee handfuls of one of them and just tossed them onto a bunch of gravel behind my garage were I used to have a dog run and where some sort of really tall, like 7-foot tall or taller really thin flowering plant had spread and would grow every year and that was it. There was no modern germination done, there wasnt any watering or fertilizing done. Males and females were not separated and for that fact at the time I wouldnt have ad any clue of how to guess which was which until buds formed on the females and since no one was growing and selling seedless pot at the time I never even imagined pot without seeds so it never dawned on me to even think about yanking the males even if I could tell which were males before the knocked up the gals in the crowd. I didnt know anything about trichomes and never looked at them with a magnifying glass to see when the plants were at their peak and instead when there were a bunch of buds I would just take one now and then and dry it and test it and when I liked the high I yanked them and dried them. As caveman-like of growing as that was the results were fantastic. The pot would knock you on your butt and to me it was like getting it for free since the beans came in pot I had already bought and smoked and I did not have to order them and pay separately for them.
If pot could be grown so crudely and have such amazing results that tells you it was all due to genetics and absolutely nothing more. I think about those times and have to wonder what the final results would have been if I had even the slightest clue about what I was doing. It would have had to have been beyond stunning.
That is why at times I laugh at myself and others who now go to such great extents to grow pot when I have seen what results can be gotten with absolutely no effort other than to throw a handful of seeds on a bunch of little round gravel and let Mother Nature do her thing.
I am sure that when it comes to things like germination rates what I did back them wouldnt come close to equaling what is done today so knowledge and modern techniques do help and do pay dividends and are more efficient but just to compare the highs I have never grow anything that topped my extremely rudimentary first attempts at growing and the only explanation for that can be genetics. They were just so utterly fantastic that they overcame all the deficiencies in what I did, or better said all that I did not know to do.
I have to guess that the author of the article who gave his opinion that todays breeders really do not want people to know how utterly fantastic the pure landrace strains of the past were because it would make them look bad might actually be on to something and maybe it was because like me he both smoked the famous strains of the past and maybe like me just tossed some beans out and let them grow on their own and had similar results and knows that it doesnt take all the things so many people today consider to be necessities to grow good pot and he knows that what is most important and what will make up for lack of care is genetics that we do not have access to today and also that if we did using the modern techniques what we would get would be beyond description and also something no breeder could take credit for or win some cup for because it was not their creation and would instead be Mother Natures creation that they just sold beans from.
Personally I would want to believe that strictly out of greed some breeders who could team up and produce beans from landrace strains of the past would do it just to get a villa in the South of France and say to hell with being given credit for the strain or strains or winning a cup, just show me the money, but so far that hasnt happened. Instead they take the one parent plant or plants of the same sex they have and use them to make crosses and try to come up with the new flavor of the month and win some award or cup and be given credit for being so great.
If I could use Mr. Peabodys Way Back Machine and go back to the 60s and early 70s and grab those cigar boxes of beans I had at the time I would make beans and sell them and not care in the least if some breeder or breeders or writers/critics said I didnt know squat because I was not making crosses. All that would matter to me would be to be able to supply people with the best of the best and to rake in the bucks doing it. I would never offer any crosses and just call it Mother Natures Beans or The Real Deal Beans or The Real McCoy Beans and leave it up to others to either grow out and smoke the real deal or to use them to cross with other strains themselves mucking up the genetics and making mutts.
I would just really get off knowing that there would be a new generation or two of pot growers/smokers who after first sampling the real deal would say, holy shit batman this stuff is beyond amazing. That would mean more to me than winning some cup or award or being written about and called a good breeder.
