Intensive gardening and low-input landraces

General Discussions
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I have a fairly small space, so I tend to garden rather intensively; I add fertilizer to the beds, try to stay on top of the weeds, and use row covers to protect crops and extend the growing season. I also get a lot of hail in the summer, and the row covers help with that.

I’m been thinking about the emphasis in landrace breeding on breeding plants to use less inputs. I’m all for that, but I’m wondering if more inputs would tend to produce a greater yield even with the best and most adapted crops possible, at least up to a certain threshold.

For instance, let’s say that I bred a pepper landrace that grew vigorously from direct-sown seeds, allowing me to skip the whole complicated process of starting them early, covering them with fabric, etc.

Still, no matter what I do, the peppers won’t be able to be planted outside in March. If I took those hardy, vigorous seeds and started them in March, I’d still have peppers earlier and for longer. And if I covered them against the fall frosts, they would bear later in the year. If the landrace has 5 degrees of frost tolerance, the row cover would still extend that tolerance by another ten degrees.

Similarly, a wonderfully adapted landrace crop might get wiped out by hail that could have been largely deflected by row covers over hoops.

And if a landrace does tolerably without nitrogen fertilizer, might it grow even better with some additional nitrogen?

In cases where the amount of land available is the limiting factor, how should we go about landrace breeding? Should we select for plants that can do without inputs, and then use the inputs on the crops for consumption, so that we aren’t as dependent on inputs?

But in the case of row cover, the environment under the cover is very different. Crops that do well outside might struggle in the moister microclimate under cover. So I’m not sure that would work. It seems that crops that will grow under cover should be selected under cover. I don’t want to be dependent on a petroleum product that might become unavailable. At the same time, I’d like the option of using it while it still is available.

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It’s possible to garden intensively without adding extra nitrogen. When we feed nitrogen to our plants, they get lazy. They don’t need to feed sugar to the microbes in the soil in exchange for nitrogen - so the microbes in the soil that would perform that function die. Encouraging a microbe-rich soil is far better than fertilizing in the long run. I’ve been learning about Johnson-Su composting in a simple aerobic bioreactor. It produces a fungal-dominant product. Dr. David Johnson found that applying the compost as an inoculant on the soil significantly increased pepper yields and biomass compared to an adjacent patch that did not receive the inoculant. He’s discovered that microbes also capture carbon in the soil - so it’s a win-win.

Here’s a long article that is fascinating: Compost & The Promise of Microbes | EcoFarming Daily

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The plants will adapt to whatever growing conditions they consistently encounter.

I have visited seed companies that use plastic extensively. I think that they do a dis-service to their customers that don’t like using plastic, because the plants have become dependent on plastics.

The principles of landrace gardening apply to any agricultural system. In my own life, I choose to grow in a low-input agricultural system. I think it leads to a more natural ecosystem where the microbes and plants live symbiotically, and it keeps me from becoming dependent on outside sources of fertility.

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That’s partially true, but only when you are growing them. When breeding there should be some selection pressure. I’m so far north that atleast some of the crops need little added help with plastic mulch and cloth to even have change to produce seeds (some even with transplants), but I try to minimize and reduce it over the years. If I have to choose, I would rather direct seed with plastic mulch and cloth than use transplants without even if change of getting seeds is same. I think it still gives better selection pressure because they can still grow quite naturally and I can screen a lot more seeds. So I should get faster something that does well with minimal help and those seeds when shered with other people can reduce total use of plastics over long period.

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I’m a bit like yourself in that I garden intensively. Not for lack of space as I’ve many acres to work with, but, the land I have is marginal, waterlogged, anaerobic, peaty mineral gley soil, some of it is actual peat bog. One could not just plough & expect anything to grow here through lack of drainage. So I grow in a modified but, traditional way of using “lazy beds” or feannagan to create a raised bed of sorts. I build these with cardboard, several inches of seaweed & then a few inches of compost & plant straight into it. I don’t really have weeds to deal with because of this & any I do get are just self-seeded previous crops My only inputs are seaweed mulch in autumn & a thin addition of compost at early spring. I could probably skip the compost in spring, but, I usually have so much it needs to go somewhere anyways. I use no other fertiliser inputs. In my case, I need my vegetables to adapt to this growing method so, this is what I will select for. I’m at 58°N in a cool, windy, maritime climate so, peppers nor tomatoes grow outdoors here so I don’t have the same worries in that regard. However, I experiment with fleece to extend my already short growing season. I can get 2 & sometimes 3 crops in a season from the same area of my garden by doing this. I only use the fleece from end of March to mid-late April depending on the weather. The only other time I might use a row cover is mesh on hoops to keep cats & birds out of some direct seeded areas but, only for a few weeks until the plants are large enough to hold their own. I don’t view either as detrimental to the seed adaptation. Permanent row covers I would though as it is akin to growing in a totally artificial growing environment which I’m personally trying to avoid. That said, the beauty of landrace gardening is being able to adapt the plants specifically to your growing methods & conditions. Yet, ideally, I want my plants to be able to do well without the addition of too much inputs/protection. If I didn’t use fleece, I would only be sacrificing a small portion of annual yield from my beds.

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Yes AND this is a great example of how personal choice and goals factor in. Anyone might get more with any or all of those things (row covers, fertilizer etc), and to some people, those things might be abundant and free, or at least worth it, and to others it isn’t.

After my last post about a formula for adaption, my brain now wants a formula for this, here is my draft for somebody else to improve on: Size of garden x personal goals x local selection pressures x (available free resources + disposable income available for supporting food production) = amount of inputs/labor/$$ to use in garden. Only you can answer this. I suppose ideally with enough space you could practice bet hedging and do both: cover some plants and let some try and ride out the hail. Or possible to plant them in a polyculture where they would get more protection? (the milpa is where peppers were domesticated after all).

  • “OVER THINKING THIS” ALERT (ME :slight_smile: )Yes maybe, but if you’re looking for yield, bet hedging suggests that varieties selected for high yield under fertilized conditions will yield more (in fertilized conditions) than landraces grown under low nitrogen environments. According to Darwinian agriculture, landraces would be the ‘conservative’ plants. However, any plant that is give more of it’s limited resources will obviosly yield more, EXCEPT something like nitrogen in a nightshade that can cause a lot of bushy growth and less actual fruit or tubers.
    *interesting side note I read: Heirloom potatoes yield less when fertilized with nitrogen, while modern potato varieties yield more. Green revolution effect of selecting for yield under the presence of synthetic nitrogen.
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Thanks so much for your thoughts, everyone!

@jannamin Thanks for bringing up that composting article, I will check it out.

As far as plants yielding without added nitrogen; I know they can, and in fact I’ve grown gardens with very minimal fertilization. If I’d know about landraces back then, I would have certainly selected for plants that do better in such conditions.

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that a population of plants adapted to low nitrogen conditions would never yield as well as a population adapted to high nitrogen conditions—if (a big if) the second population was given abundant nitrogen. I find myself in this situation: I have limited space, and so yield is very important to me. At the same time, waste nitrogen is widely available; not only are organic nitrogen fertilizers cheap, but there are lots of high-nitrogen wastes available—coffee grounds and other organic wastes, unwanted vegetation, humanure, etc. Tapping into these waste streams, and adapting my landraces to their presence, would return higher yields per square foot than adapting the plants to lower nitrogen yield.

The risk, of course, is that I’d end up in trouble if the nitrogen sources became unavailable, and that my seeds would be less useful to those in other situations. I wonder how fast a diverse landrace would “downshift” in response to lower nitrogen conditions? I suppose it is also true that soil nitrogen would only drop off gradually, giving time for adaption.

@Joseph_Lofthouse I agree about the seed companies; growing crops in very low-input conditions seems like a better strategy. That way they would work better for everyone, particularly for those who are too poor to access resources.

@JesseI interesting points about transplanting vs fabric/plastic. I do a lot of transplanting, because it saves space; I can start a lot of seeds in a very small area and then plant them out to fill a larger area. That effectively expands my garden space, since something else can be happening while those seedlings are growing. (In-ground composting, cover crops, creating a state seed bed, successional planting.) But it certainly isn’t as easy to screen a lot of seeds that way; I’ve got an emotional attachment to all the work I did for each nice little transplant.

@motherofgley, those must be really difficult conditions! Just about the exact opposite of what I’m dealing with. And I imagine there isn’t a lot of active plant breeding aimed at such an environment, so landrace growing should be the way to go!

@julia.dakin Bet hedging would be a good idea—particularly for the seed-saving populations. For instance, I might go on starting my spring cabbages under cover, but direct-sow my fall cabbages (some of which will be saved for seed) in the open with less inputs.

As I understand it, the whole strategy of the Green Revolution hinged on breeding plants that could make good use of abundant nitrogen. The varieties were crucial, but without the extra nitrogen they wouldn’t be that special. (Though Denison seemed to think otherwise; he seemed to argue that short-stem varieties would still have a competitive edge even in low-nitrogen conditions—though maybe not in high-weed conditions!) So I’m not sure what to think.

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Maybe you don’t have to worry about nitrogen sources becoming unavailable, you’d just need to switch sources. After all, we produce nitrogen fertilizer daily :slight_smile: Our waste maybe isn’t the nicest thing to deal with, but in the case where the coffee grounds were no longer available I suspect the distaste would become less important.

Also… modern breeding selects for high yield of inbred plants under fertilized and sprayed conditions, but you’ll have high genetic diversity, and also be selecting for best taste/healthy plants/pest resistant under fertilized conditions. That’s different… and you’ll do great. Best of all the worlds maybe. Where are you located anyway?

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There are a couple chapters in this book that you would appreciate on this topic. Of the history of grain breeding and the differences in modern and ancient varieties. Lots of research plus anecdotal evidence. Certainly made me want to trial modern vs older landrace wheats side by side and see the differences myself. But I didn’t get around to it… I’ll leave it to you.

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@julia.dakin Very true! My thinking is that city gardens have always been intensive, nutrient-rich “sinks”, incorporating nitrogen from human and animal wastes, nitrogen that was originally brought in from the wider landscape as food and fodder.

I’m in a suburb of, CO; a high-desert/high plains landscape. The climate is pretty extreme in some ways; last week, we went from a high of 62 degrees F to a low of negative 8 degrees F in about 36 hours, and the temperature has now bounced back up into the high 50s. That sort of thing is not uncommon; we can and do get frosts from September through May, but at the same time it is not uncommon to get temperatures above 60 degrees during the winter. And we get quite a bit of wind and hail.

I will have to check that book out! One of my long-term goals is to rent a piece of unirrigated land outside the city to raise grain and oilseed crops.

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@MalcolmS I don’t have the trouble of plants growing before I start planting. Our season starts fast and ends fast so that it’s hard to get two crops except by interplanting which I do when it makes sense. Something like salads after potatoes works, but I rather interplant and harvest one crop to give space. There are definitely different considerations depending on your climate. I think i would still rather direct sow between previous crop than use tarnsplants if it’s possible and goal is to breed rather than just to grow. With growing transplants I have noticed many small problems that might affect the growth so that it might not be as fair comparison as direct sowing.

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I want a do-over on thinking about this question.

First off, I want to avoid being dogmatic or puritanical. I want to advocate for what I love without badmouthing what I dislike.

I visit intensively-managed farms. Seems to me, like they consider the plants to be cogs in a system of domination and control. I sense a deep disconnect between that sort of conquistador attitude, and the type of happy-go-lucky landrace gardening that I practice. I devoted a chapter of the book to discussing this. Those types of farms could grow genetically-diverse crops, and allow cross-pollination, but I wouldn’t call them landraces. Machine-races might apply.

The command and control attitude eradicated landraces from many parts of the world. If the deep connection between the land, plants, people, and ecosystem gets disrupted, then controlling the people gets simplified.

Having high fertility doesn’t exclude a farmer from growing landrace style, but it makes it harder, cause if they cling to control in one area, how many other areas require controlling? At what point does it stop being a living landrace and just part of a mechanical machine?

I consider landrace gardening to be more about food security every year, than about high yields in perfect years.

Quotes below from people that taught me about landrace gardening:

“Yield stability of landraces under traditional low input agricultural systems is due to the fact that whatever the varying biotic and abiotic stress for each plant one or more genotypes within the landrace population will yield satisfactorily. Landraces were and still are grown by farmers, market and private gardeners all over the world for this reason.” Euphytica 104: 127�139, 1998. � 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Landraces: A review of definitions and classifications A.C. Zeven

“A landrace is a variety that has been purposely maintained as a diverse gene pool to help it be more adaptive to harsh conditions.” AdaptiveSeeds.com 2012 seed catalog.

“Without synthetic inputs, the true strengths or frailties of a cultivar become clear.” Wild Garden Seed Catalog, 2009

“farmers who want to honor their plurality of values, minimize risk, and maximally fulfill their needs will plant a diversity of landrace populations that are internally diverse.” Landrace Agriculture as an Expression of Pluralistic Values, Jake Wartell

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The area I have to grow is pretty limited but I’ve tried to go low input as much as I can. I do still transplant my tomatoes and peppers but want to go to direct seeding them. There are a few reasons for this. One is that I don’t want to end up some year where I can’t get the seeds, amendments, fertlizers, etc. that I’m dependent on. Another aspect is that I can still afford to garden even if I have a year where I don’t have much disposable income. Going along with that is that if I share seeds with someone they are more likely to be successful with them. I also think of something Joseph said on permies about robbing Peter to pay Paul. Even if the package on the products we use says “organic,” they company still took resources from one place to sell somewhere else. I think there is an environmental aspect to landrace gardening too.

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“If I import nutrients into my garden from elsewhere, then I am turning somewhere else into a desert.”

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I suppose exceptions could be where food waste is used that would otherwise end up in a landfill (or waterway/etc) and be a pollutant there too instead of a resource on a farm. I have a neighbor that accepts trucks of spent grain from a local brewery and composts it. It smells like dead animals and would be a giant problem to deal with in any other way, and too much fuel to bring it back to the farms. I like this way of thinking that that city/town centers may have always had the opposite problem of rural areas-- too much fertility from food and human waste that pollutes streams and oceans if not dealt with properly. And adding it to soil feels like the best way to deal with it… It’s hard to imagine a scenario where waste isn’t created where humans concentrate.

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New here! and love your contributions.

but no, importing nutrients doesn’t necessarily turn somewhere else into a dessert. Living creatures have redistributed nutrients for a billion years. shelled animals like clams, oysters and coral, have syphoned calcium carbonate off the ocean currents, and concentrated it, creating rich limestoned soil in regions, while other regions have none.

I think there’s a lot of potential for humans to redistribute nutrients in ways that are beneficial to most lifeforms. We just don’t do that most of the time.

I think it’s more a question to be asked "does importing this nutrient: 1) reduce a toxicity in the other place or 2)induce a deficiency in the other place. and 3)does the process of importation cause more harm than good

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Thanks for all the thoughts!

Yes, utilizing a problematic waste product would seem to make fertilization a net benefit. Of course, ideally all waste products would go back to the land they came from; but that can be logistically difficult. Transporting spent brewer’s mash even a short distance might not be worth it, energetically speaking. The bulk of most organic material is made up of water, carbon, and nitrogen; these are all globally cycled elements. So more of them can be pulled from the air to replace the ones shipped off the land. Growing more nitrogen-fixing cover crops on extensive fields outside of town while using nitrogen-rich organic wastes in intensive suburban gardens seems like a good idea.

The real problem is with the small percentage of “ash” elements; stuff like calcium, potassium, phosphorus, and the other mineral nutrients that plants require. Their global cycle is so slow (involving subduction and volcanism) that we can easily “mine” a piece of land by exporting produce; if we’re exporting produce and not fertilizing (or eating produce and using a municipal sewage system), we could end up in trouble. People like Joseph Lofthouse or myself probably don’t need to worry too much; we’re in the arid west, and our soils and irrigation water are highly mineralized. But in leached, acid fields in wetter climates this can be a big problem. A one-time importation of some limestone or oyster shells, and utilizing trace mineral supplements if testing shows that they are necessary, seems like something that could be sustainable, if coupled with a commitment to “closing the loop” and ensuring that nutrients don’t leave the land. Such a one-time importation of mineral fertilizers would raise the biological carrying capacity of the land, and would mimic natural processes, such as salmon which carry oceanic minerals back to the headwaters of rivers, or grazing herds which move minerals out of lush river valleys toward the more barren ridgelines.

In fact, it would mimic the practices of some native groups in the PNW, who built up vast “shell middens”; these areas now support more healthy and diverse vegetation than surrounding areas.

Speaking of which, urban gardens highly enriched with organic wastes would mimic one of the proposed origins of agriculture: the dump pile garden. The theory is that a vigorous, weedy flora would have colonized the trash heaps of semi-sedentary hunter-gatherer tribes; this flora would have included the ancestors of many of our crop plants. Many of them still have the “junk pile look”—squash family plants, tomatoes, and prunus species, among others, will happily germinate and grow in compost piles. These thriving patches of vegetation would have been utilized by the local inhabitants, and over time horticulture would have developed in this way.

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I really like Julia’s point that food waste is best composted as close to where it was turned into waste as possible. Especially when we factor in the environmental costs of most transportation (more fossil fuels being burned).

I figure if I have available compostable waste, it should always go in my garden. If it came from somewhere else originally, well, it’s way better than it being transported somewhere else. Especially if that other place would be a landfill!

The only compostable waste I throw into a landfill is seed heads of weeds. If I could figure out a way to compost those without spreading more weeds in my garden, I happily would, but those seeds seem to be way too good at surviving when I let them stay.

Ideally, I’d like to add as inputs only things that are already part of my ecosystem (like my neighbor’s leaves that they were planning to throw away), or which needed to be imported for some other reason anyway (like leftover scraps from my food from the grocery store, or cardboard boxes that were used to mail things here).

I never, ever want to contribute to a tragedy like what happened to Burundi. Instead, I want to be part of something like the “greening the desert” initiative, like what Niger is doing to reclaim the Sahara by organizing what’s already in the ecosystem more cleverly. A system like that is awesome! Things like that are an inspiration to us all!

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One other thought, on transplanting rather than fertilizing, in response to @John_Thomas . I’ve been thinking that one way to get the benefits of both direct seeding and transplanting would be to sow seeds in seedbeds rather than pots or soil blocks, and then “pricking them out” to a wider spacing. That way, in dry climates, irrigation can be concentrated on the seed bed, but we’d still be able to plant large numbers of seeds and screen for early vigor and other beneficial traits. We’d also be able to use transplanting to stay ahead of the weeds, and avoid the need for a fine seed bed for small seeds. (I find less than through bed prep works for large seeds or for transplants, but not as well for small seeds.) And we’d be able to cull weak plants without leaving gaps in the resulting stand—gaps that could skew our later selection process.

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Let the weed seeds dry put, burn them, and use them as fertilizer.