I recently travelled to Oxton Organics market garden in Worcestershire for what felt like a very special gathering. Joseph Lofthouse, the author of ‘Landrace Gardening: Food security through biodiversity and promiscuous pollination’ (2021), was there to present his approach and thereby enable the networking of other growers who are keen to get on board with the Landrace movement.
Picture: Joseph Lofthouse's book
So what is Landrace?
It is an approach to saving seeds and growing crops that enables greater adaptation to their environment. It does this through deliberate cross pollination of multiple varieties of a crop by planting them close together and letting the pollinating insects and wind do the work. Seeds are then selected and saved from more successful plants and become the progenitors of the next generation. This promotes greater diversity within the gene pool, which enhances the capacity to adapt to conditions and change over successive generations.
Joseph has found that by trusting plants' inherent intelligence and capacity to adapt over successive generations, wildly successful adaptations and increases in plant health and yield are possible. For example, we all know that carrots don't like company and want regular weeding, right? Well what if you just don't weed your carrots and let them go to seed and save seeds only from those that grew well under the weedy conditions? And then did the same next year? Well in the course of three years like this, Joseph ended up with 5 pound carrots growing amongst the weeds!
Picture: Paul & Jen grew Desert Spirit Landrace squash this year.
This kind of breeding is of course exactly what humans have been doing since the agricultural revolution. But it is the opposite of what has been happening in recent decades, since the emergence of industrialised agriculture. Who, to ensure high crop yields of varieties with the desired characteristics for the mass supermarket economy, uses huge amounts of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to feed and protect crops. This makes sense in the context of feeding the post-industrial sized population with recognisable veg types in ways that generate corporate profits. But over generations of seed saving for true type varieties, what results is loss of genetic diversity, creating fragility to environmental changes that cannot be controlled for. In addition to all the now better understood consequences of flooding the land with fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.
To illustrate this fragility point, consider what happens when a novel disease enters a region in which a particular crop is grown on mass scale from the same seed stock that has very little genetic diversity within it. If that seed doesn’t have defences against the disease, then potentially the whole crop can become infected and destroyed. Contrast this to Landrace crops, where breeding for genetic diversity in the seed stock means that whilst there are sometimes new hybrids that are either small or don't taste good, there are others that are beautiful and tasty. Plus the increased diversification means that no matter the ecosystem and environmental changes, such as a novel disease, there are always some that survive and thrive. Whilst this potentially means a lower yield per acreage per growing season, it means greater overall resilience of the crop and capacity for ongoing adaptation.
Picture: cross pollination can be beautiful.
To increase the genetic diversity in a seed stock, cross pollination between crop varieties within a species is needed. Such as growing many types of kale all together so that they cross pollinate, saving the seed and sowing this the following year. This is an alternative to buying fixed varieties from seed catalogues each year. Of course cross pollination is much easier for some types of veg than others, depending upon the extent to which they openly pollinate (rather than self-pollinating).
This all sounds much more possible when growing at scale, so what could it look like for the small scale grower and seed saver?
It simply requires planting more than one variety close together, so that the pollinators fly from one to another, and saving seeds from some of these to plant the next year. Then selecting those that do well in your particular local conditions. In fact, as we saw with Joseph's carrots, growing plants in what we might consider to be 'tough conditions' means that over the seasons you are developing seed that can grow well where F1 seed packets cannot.
Picture: crowd breeding kale.
Seed saving amongst growers who can learn and share together becomes an empowering community tool. The concept of crowd breeding has arisen from this, where a Landrace seed is shared amongst a number of growers, who then grow it out and save the seed from those that did well and tasted good. Thus creating more resilience for that Landrace to continue thriving and adapting amongst the community and creating greater food security.
For me, the added joy of Landrace gardening, beyond cultivating seed stocks that are better equipped to adapt to environmental changes, is the beauty of diversity, surprises and community connection.
If you would like to know more then check out Going to Seed website and Joseph Lofthouse’s book: https://goingtoseed.org/