I disagree. I was new to growing, and was into heirlooms. Then I came across the modern landrace approach and immediately loved it. Maybe it’s similar to the iPhone - nobody knew they wanted it until they were made aware of it. I’m sure plenty of people were very loyal to other brands and types who then converted once they were aware of what was on offer. So I would say the key is in making people aware of what’s on offer. And the languaging of it is significant in that.
To continue with the analogy, just imagine if Apple had merely marketed the ‘phone’! Or imagine if permaculture were just called ‘gardening’ - to bring in @ShaneS 's point, imagine the torment you would have googling what you actually want! Though to add to that point, if you google ‘landrace’, you… well anyway I, get 10,300,000 results. It’s already a well established term, so just using a preexisting term that perhaps means something rather different than what is meant here, might not be ideal either.
“Modern landrace” on the other hand, gets 1,020 results, and includes things akin to what we are focused on, such as this modern wheat landrace bred in Scotland:
To me that seems like it might come across as meaning heirlooms to many people.
I think the difference there is that they would most likely be maintaining phenotypically homogenous populations, the old landrace way, if you go back far enough and if they were farmers. Though if they were gardeners, even a lot of them would have been using stabilised varieties from the seed catalogues over the last few hundred years (which are now preserved as ‘heirlooms’) - the others I would assume old traditional landraces. I think the major difference is this modern landrace approach uses a deliberately exceedingly high rate of genetic and phenotypic variation. Basically a kind of accelerated ‘pioneer’ approach. We may not be going to ‘new lands’ as such but in a way we are. Instead of arriving in wilderness (or stealing other people’s land but wanting to plant crops familiar to us), we are arriving in the land we are already in, which happens to be biologically a bit of a barren wasteland, and on top of that, is mostly devoid of suitable crops, having been inhabited from before we were born by barbarians with their chemical methods or further back than that, with their soil-erosive methods. So for many of us in terms of the farming methods we want to use, we may be ‘pioneers’.
I kind of like the sound of that, except it sounds like a focus on the gardening methods, which Joseph seems to avoid talking about. Something more seed-focused would seem more appropriate.
How about ‘cultivating seeds with resilience’?
I don’t get that sense with ‘permaculture’. And it’s very popular. And an excellent approach.
In terms of marketing, perhaps just getting some big names in permaculture on board, would do a lot. If they started raving about the ‘modern landrace’ approach, that could be quite powerful, for example. I know some who are really into heirlooms but here’s where the ‘learn by seeing’ comes in. Maybe just give away a bunch of seeds to various permaculture folk if they promise to plant them!