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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >One can get results by selecting from within a strain, but the genes have 
> to
> exist in the strain's population. There's not much chance of getting a
> yellow tomato by selecting from within a strain that produces red fruit.
> 

Karen, I think you state the case well enough.  To obtain a stable strain 
requires a lot of space, a lot of involvement, and a lot of mirthless 
record-keeping.  Also well taken is the point that if you maintianed 
separated 
populations of the parent strains, you could produce F1 hybrids on your own, 
still with 
a lot of work in some cases where you must pollinate with a brush and thwart 
natural self-pollination.

But a thing to keep in mind, says I, is that it is difficult to compare 
animals to plants, chickens to tomatoes.  There are vast differences in 
breeding 
animals than plants.  If you cross two types of rabbits, you can get 
offspring 
from a single parent for many litters for many years.  But a tomato has one 
generational shot at it, for example.

There is are two paradigms going on in this.  The one is where the husbandman 
is going to fix the environment and then vary all and sundry charateristics 
of this crops.  In the case you mention of the Oregon Leghorn, did the 
breeder 
take into account free range and chicken tractors and other such 
environments? 
 I'm guessing those were not foremost in his mind.  Rather the target was 
achievement of 300 eggs a year under commercial conditions that prevailed at 
the 
time. When, let's say, a hybrid tomato is developed, is it developed with 
organic methods, intensive planting, companion planting, etc. in mind.  Most 
likely not.

The other paradigm is take the growing conditions where they lie and develop 
plants and animals that adpat to them.  Here on this bit of truck the 
chickens 
are completely free range in the most strict sense of the term.  There are no 
neighbors close enough to be bothered by the chickens so they roam the 
pastures, swamps, creek bottoms, and woods foraging for all manner of insect, 
fungus, lichen, etc.  Maximum egg production is not nearly so important as 
survival 
savvy.   Is the chicken hickory stump hardy and canny enough to evade foxes 
and hawks?   Likewise in the garden plants that respond best to very organic 
soil, hand watering, hand weeding, hand insect removal, root deep enough to 
resist being pulled up by crows, etc. are the most desireable.

On a homestead I am thinking the case could be made that saving seed (or 
stock) from OP varieties and propogating those has more prospects of getting 
a 
variety adapted to the particular needs of that homestead than cross breeding 
does.  As far as the red and yellow tomatoes go, I know the goal of the 
hybridizer is to, for example, grow a tomato with all the good charateristics 
of the 
red one by rather have the tomato show up yellow.  But there are a zillion OP 
varieties of tomato available now of days.  I would look for better results 
on 
the homestead by growing a desireable red variety and a desireable yellow 
variety (or score of each) and selecting the best for seed.

Never say never, and distain no tool in the box, but overall it seems that 
the mindset of hybridization goes hand in hand with monocropping and 
agribusiness.

The ancient Peruvians had a diverse ecosystem in which to farm.  On the high 
slopes of the Andes there were bits and niches of land, some naturally 
occuring and some terraced, at every altitude and every angle from the sun 
... some 
facing south, some west, some east, etc.   Over the centuries they developed 
(maninly by selection) potatoes that would grow best in each of those many, 
many 
conditions.  That's why the bewildering array of colors, sizes, shapes, and 
textures of the 700 or more varieties of potatoes grown there.

When the Europeans took the potato back with them, they only took three 
cultivars.  Out of these, by the 1750's, only one strain was deemed best for 
northern climates and supplanted all the others.  The variety became know as 
the 
'Lunker' because of its size and by the early 1800's it accounted for all the 
potatoes in Ireland.  The potato blight, that had been present all along, 
developed a strain itself that was hyper deadly to the Lunker and wiped them 
out 
nearly entierly.

This, says I, represents the different paradigms of changing the plant to fit 
the environment in which you must needs grow it and changing the plant to one 
consistent characteristic and hoping to change all of Nature to fit it.

Selection favors the former and hybridization favors the latter.


James