permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

michael snow wrote:
> I'm not sure what message this responds to, that is, what the concern is.
> I'm new here, and don't want to step into a conversation I haven't followed
> from the beginning.  But here's a thought:
> Breeding resistance.  The potato anecdote reminds me of what is called
> Horizontal Resistance, that is, breeding polygenic resistance in plants.
> Such a program would expose a population to ALL pests, parasites, diseases,
> etc that occurr locally or regionally, the inocculation roguing the
> population in its own way.  Horizontal resistance is accumulated using
> recurrent mass selection: the surviving individuals are selected en masse
> and improved up on in the next generation.
> So, pick the beans that don't get rust.
> see Return to Resistance, Roul A. Robinson.  1996: agAccess, Davis.

Michael:

Here's a followup from Bear in the PCPlantDB list:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Synth, comments, etc
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2004 17:32:15 -0800
From: Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>
To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org

The message from John D'hondt actually tied in well with a couple of
books I've found recently called Return to Resistance, and
Self-Organizing Agro-Ecosystems by Raoul A. Robinson (available free
online as PDF's from http://sharebooks.ca). It's a recommended book if
you don't know of it already. Raoul is a crop scientist, and talks
about the difference between "vertical" (modern, single-gene parasite
resistance that parasites can evolve around) and "horizontal"
resistance (multi-gene resistance, that can't be easily adapted
around). Also some history of a variety of crops (potatoes, etc), and
the recent obsession with Mendelian breeding, vs "qualitative"
breeding. It's all been rather informative. The techniques of D'hondt
are very much what Robinson would recommend (save seed, maintain
parasite pressure [don't destroy the affected crop] and select seed
from crops that are forming resistance).