In order to keep multiple distinct corn landraces separate(sweet,four,flint,dent), as well as several heirloom and open pollinated varieties from crossing despite my limited growing space, I decided to use A.I. to schedule my plantings in accordance to their tasseling dates. 13 varieties. That is how many I’m planting because I’ve developed quite a collection in pursuit of the right varieties to add to my landrace. By growing them out I plan to evaluate how they do. This will save me the trouble of weeding out inferior genetics before they enter.
My motivations were inspired by Glenn Drowns of sandhill preservation center, as they have a rotating selection of hundreds of varieties that they keep pure. My hopes are to be able offer germplasm to those in my area and online.
I felt like sharing this because I think A.I. is an invaluable resource to plant breeding for those without the time and resources to compile the data like myself. It probably would have taken me a couple hours as I don’t have much more than a sharpy and printer paper, and anyone with a 2 year old might know they can make a short task take all day
Is there any chance the A.I. doesn’t take into consideration that some corn might tassel sooner/later depending on environmental conditions or is that a risk you’re willing to take? I’m growing my red popcorn right next to the neighbor’s GMO dent this year because supposedly GMO can’t pollinate popcorn (yet and hopefully forever). Have you ever heard that?
It has brought up that specified the risk and asserted that only 2 of the varieties are at risk by about a few days possibly. To avoid that I’m planting them on the north and south ends of the garden as the wind typically blows west to east during that time of year and will be separated by the other corn. Its a small risk but Im not terribly concerned as they are very different and any crosses will be noticeable when shelling for seed.
And I am familiar with the genomic incompatibility that popcorn has but I’m not sure its shared in all popcorns? I could be wrong but im just throwing it out there, it’s a very interesting gene and if I had access to lab testing id make it a foundation for my work. There are a number of new varieties bred to share this gene for farmers to be able to save seed without the risk of patented genes entering the population. Dr. Frank Kutka of the college of the Menomonee nation has done some awesome work bringing these to market in dent corns and I think a flour corn as well if im not mistaken. Sand hill preservation has one of his corns for sale.
Most popcorns are hard for anything else across with them because they got that same gene that teósinte that said popcorn can cross with the other corns crossed into the other corns
I use programming and automation for many things related to gardening, like organizing my knowledge in a database I can do searches on and let the software clean up my data in different ways. I would be very hesitant with all the new AI going around, if by AI we mean the large-language models and if by use we mean asking them questions that have anything to do about truth. They can give the impression that they “know” things, but fundamentally they can’t do real abstract, formal logic - which is presumably what you need.
I take any information I get from A.I. with a grain of salt, and when I use it to organize things for me I always proofread to make sure it’s using the data I input appropriately. When I first asked it to organize my corns, it made the assumption that all corn tassels 20 days before maturity, so it definitely takes a bit of practice to get the desired results. I don’t rely on it for factual information. I tried the switch to Gemini and oh my gosh it was less than useless compared to the chatgbt model I use. I am honestly not surprised it told you that . And I fear for anyone who is (i can’t think of how to phrase it) tech illiterate that uses it
I suppose it depends on the AI and what information/sources it has to work with. Some searches with the Brave browser “Leo” have mostly given fairly good summaries of searches.
This article came to mind when this topic of ai came up:
I struggle to see the value other than fun and games. It’s fun because it looks like it could be true and sometimes manages to fool someone who doesn’t know the field that the LLM is parroting. As soon as you ask an LLM something about a field you have deep knowledge in, you see how faulty they are. Whenever I am presented with knowledge that someone copied from an LLM, I tend to discard it. We’re reaching serious spam levels of this stuff and the computing power it takes to run these models are significant now, not to speak of the astronomical funds they’re receiving that could have gone to things like reversing climate change.
