A landrace is a population of a crop shaped by farmers and local conditions in one region over a long time. It has a recognisable type, local adaptation (to climate, day length, pests and use) and more internal variation than a modern cultivar. It is maintained by saving seed from the best plants each season (Villa et al. 2005).
In practice
Cannabis landraces from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Morocco and other regions are the foundation of almost every modern line. Hashish, charas and sinsemilla traditions show those farmers mastered high-quality cannabis long before modern breeding.
True landraces are under pressure. Imported hybrid seed has been crossed into many source populations, and modern genomic work shows how much mixing has occurred. Seed sold online as "landrace" may be a recent collection, a reselection or a hybrid. Ask when and where it was collected, how many parents were used and how it was maintained.
Don't confuse with
- Heirloom: a line kept outside its source region, often for decades; a landrace is kept where it evolved.
- IBL: inbred and stabilised; a landrace is open-pollinated and variable.
- Wild cannabis (feral): escaped populations, not farmer-maintained.
Myth check
Old landrace cannabis was not weak. See old cannabis was not weak and, on collection ethics, landrace hunting and biopiracy.
The daily length of light versus dark; photoperiod cannabis flowers when nights grow long enough, rather than at a fixed age.Hashish is the traditional pressed resin concentrate of cannabis, made for centuries by sieving or rubbing trichome heads from plants and compressing them into blocks or balls.Charas is hashish made by rubbing the resin off living cannabis flowers by hand and rolling it into balls or sticks, a traditional method of the Himalayan regions.Sinsemilla (sensi) is seedless cannabis flower from unpollinated female plants; the word is Spanish for "without seed".An heirloom is a seed line kept and passed down by growers for decades, usually outside its region of origin, preserving an older type rather than a recent hybrid.An IBL (inbred line) is a seed line that has been inbred and selected over many generations until it breeds true for its main traits, giving uniform offspring.Stabilisation is breeding a seed line over several generations, with selection each time, until it reliably reproduces the chosen traits from seed.Open-pollinated seed comes from a population left to cross freely among its own plants, without controlled pairs, which keeps a line's variation and type over generations.The gene pool is the total set of alleles present in a population, cultivar group or species; a narrow gene pool limits what breeders can select from.An accession is a distinct sample of plant material (seed, tissue or cuttings) entered into a collection or gene bank under its own ID with records of origin.Introgression is the movement of genes from one population or type into another through hybridisation followed by repeated backcrossing.A hybrid is the offspring of two genetically different parents; almost all modern cannabis is hybrid, built from crosses between landrace-derived and other lines.
