Landrace
Cultural and market preferences for landraces include culinary uses and product attributes such as texture, color, or ease of use.
There are differences between authoritative sources on the specific criteria which describe landraces, although there is broad consensus about the existence and utility of the classification.
Individual criteria may be weighted differently depending on a given source's focus (e.g., governmental regulation, biological sciences, agribusiness, anthropology and culture, environmental conservation, pet -keeping and -breeding, etc.).
The first known reference to the role of landraces as genetic resources was made in 1890 at an agriculture and forestry congress in Vienna, Austria.
The term was first defined by Kurt von Rümker in 1908,[7] and more clearly described in 1909 by U. J. Mansholt, who wrote that landraces have more stable characteristics and better resistance to adverse conditions, but have lower production capacity than cultivars, and are apt to change genetically when moved to another environment.
[7] H. Kiessling added in 1912 that a landrace is a mixture of phenotypic forms despite relative outward uniformity, and a great adaptability to its natural and human environment.
He describes landraces as an early stage of breed development, created by a combination of founder effect, isolation, and environmental pressures.
[7][5][18] Within academic agronomy, the term autochthonous landrace is sometimes used with a more technical, productivity-related definition, synthesized by A. C. Zeven from previous definitions beginning with Mansholt's: "an autochthonous landrace is a variety with a high capacity to tolerate biotic and abiotic stress, resulting in a high yield stability and an intermediate yield level under a low input agricultural system.
[4] However, as industrialized agriculture spreads, cultivars, which are selectively bred for high yield, rapid growth, disease and drought resistance, and other commercial production values, are supplanting landraces, putting more and more of them at risk of extinction.
However, in some jurisdictions, a focus on their production may result in missing out on some benefits afforded to producers of genetically selected and homogenous organisms, including breeders' rights legislation, easier availability of loans and other business services, even the right to share seed or stock with others, depending on how favorable the laws in the area are to high-yield agribusiness interests.
[9] As Regine Andersen of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (Norway) and the Farmers' Rights Project puts it, "Agricultural biodiversity is being eroded.
"[9] Protecting farmer interests and protecting biodiversity is at the heart of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the "Plant Treaty" for short), under the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), though its concerns are not exclusively limited to landraces.
[22] An in situ conservation effort to save the Berrettina di Lungavilla squash landrace made use of participatory plant breeding practices in order to incorporate the local community into the work.
[23] Preservation efforts for cereal strains are ongoing including in situ and in online-searchable germplasm collections (seed banks), coordinated by Biodiversity International and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB, UK).
[9] Efforts (as of 2008[update]) were mostly focused on Iberia, the Balkans, and European Russia, and dominated by species from mountainous areas.
[4] Landrace cultivation in central and northwest Europe was almost eradicated by the early 20th century, due to economic pressure to grow improved, modern cultivars.
[4] The label landrace includes regional cultigens that are genetically heterogeneous, but with enough characteristics in common to permit their recognition as a group.
[25] Conversely, modern cultivars can also be developed into a landrace over time when farmers save seed and practice selective breeding.
[7] A clear example of vegetal landrace would consist in the diverse adaptations of wheat to differential artificial selection constraints.
In contrast to the landrace, in the various standardized Collie breeds, purebred individuals closely match a breed-standard appearance but might have lost other useful characteristics and have developed undesirable traits linked to inbreeding.
