Oh, and for what it’s worth, I recently applied for the Executive Director position of a large seed organization. I ended up withdrawing my application because of the political stances that the organization takes. I commend Going to Seed for focusing on our core mission.
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Adaptation Agriculture seems to be the winning option.
Might I suggest finishing up the first season/year on the Going to Seed podcast first, then making the rebranding when we launch season 2? We could do a few other things to make the next season a bit more polished (like commissioning a simple music stab for the opening to get listeners in the mood). Offering a few sponsorship/ad slots could also be worth considering.
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Yes thank you everybody! We’re going to summarize some more of this conversation because there were other excellent suggestions for phrasing to newbies that will be useful.
And there were a lot of suggestions for some version of the word Adapt (mostly ‘Adaptive’). It’s a great word but it’s already taken (handicap accessible gardening).
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“Adaptation agriculture” is a great choice, both because of the alliteration and because the term encompasses both gardening and farming.
I would love to see this mindset become a common practice among large-scale farmers, just like crop rotation and composting. I think this approach will be very helpful to a lot of farmers, and a delight to the communities they serve.
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I agree Adaptation Agriculture/Gardening is good and an improvement.
Personally I still prefer ‘diversity’ instead. It seems to me that it’s possible to get adaptation - - even very effective adaptation - - without a basis of genetic diversity.
I’m sure this was discussed as an alternative, along with the fact that you have the same challenge in either direction. If you go with diversity, there are types of diversity that are not genetic within a cross-breeding population. You can also have diversity without saving seeds.
If you go with adaptation, you can have effective adaptation without emphasizing genetic diversity, though all other things being equal it’ll almost certainly be less effective. It doesn’t seem to me like you can really accomplish much without saving seeds though, so ‘adaptation’ does seem to imply seed-saving more strongly than ‘diversity’.
I still like ‘diversity’ better, as promiscuous pollination with a basis of genetic diversity seems to me to be the secret sauce of landrace gardening. Emphasizing the unique dimension of practice seems better to me and a clearer and more immediate differentiator from other systems than emphasizing the uniquely strong adaptation that comes as a result
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@ShaneS I’d assumed we would keep the podcast name as “Going to Seed” and Adaptation Agriculture / Gardening would appear in the description. Not re-branding our organization or website, but rather re-naming the method.
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What about Zero-Input Agriculture? 
When I first introduce the subject with someone, I find myself using phrases like:
Low-input gardening
Neglect gardening (if I’m feeling cheeky)
Adaptive plant breeding
Developing crops that grow like weeds on your land
Farming locally adapted plants
Adapt the plants to your land, not the other way around
Creating genetically diverse, adaptable crops that can respond quickly to climate change
I agree that “landrace” rings no bells for most people and includes a word which, out of context, can raise people’s resistance to what you have to say. 
P.S. I am new here and just realizing that this discussion already came to a conclusion, but I’ll just leave this post here anyway. Adaptation Gardening/Agriculture is great.
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That’s such a brilliant phrase. Would make a good subtitle. “Land” is simpler but in reality, adaptation encompasses much more: your climate, personal growing practices, etc. If I’d replace any word, it may be “land.” Just my two cents 
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@JonathanDeRevonah Thanks for the input. What would you replace ‘land’ with? garden? climate? growing style?
environment?
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Something broader. I was also thinking “environment,” like @Patate suggested, or maybe “growing conditions.” I think “land” sounds better but is less precise, although a simple explanation could elaborate on “land” meaning more than just your soil and locale.
“Adapt your plants to their environment/growing conditions/land, not the other way around.”
The phrase is catchy and encapsulates the whole idea.
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“Terroir” fits the bill, encapsulating all those concepts, but is usually reserved for viniculture in English. Of course, in French it just means “land.”
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I really do like the term “land.” It’s so simple, intuitive, and easy to understand. It will speak to small-scale gardeners, large-scale farmers, and everyone in between.
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I only just stumbled upon this discussion by chance. After reading (almost) everything, I would like to point out two things that are important to me: I think both “adaptation” and “agriculture” miss the central points that are at issue, or at least, in my opinion, should be:
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“Adaptation”
Adaptation is a secondary process that has a primary prerequisite: the diversity of different, unique individuals.
What we, as “landrace gardeners,” therefore primarily do is create/increase individual diversity by allowing as many varieties of a crop species to mix freely/promiscuously as possible and propagating a maximum diversity of different variants.The creation and maintenance of (individual) “diversity” is the central point that should be brought to awareness. The term “adaptation” tends to obscure this; moreover, it is misunderstood by many people who understand “adaptation” to mean the adaptation of an individual rather than the adaptation of a population.
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“Agriculture”
The term “agriculture” stands for the cultivation/treatment of the land and thereby obscures the essence of what we as “landrace gardeners” are concerned with: the cultivation of plants.
The living entity “plant” should be the focus. We sow and nurture plants. We want them to thrive and grow magnificently.The cultivation of plants is central; we should therefore speak of plant cultivation and not agriculture.
For these reasons, I believe that “landrace cultivation” is the correct, better term. We “landrace gardeners” simply need to clarify what constitutes a landrace: That a landrace was (and is) a population of plants consisting of a multitude of different individuals. This characteristic made a landrace adaptable in the past and makes it adaptable today.
Is there a dicussion here in the forum about what makes a landrace a landrace?
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I would say it’s a requisite of landracing/adaption gardening, whatever one calls it, for the individual to know the basics of what makes seeds adaptable. I do agree that there is a chance/danger that many take what terms bring to their mind and run with it. If people are predisposed to some notions or values, it might be hard to change their mind. Like some people are really into heirlooms and hearing about F1s or crosses brings them shivers, but the idea of adaption appeals to them. Like I run into one blog in finnish which had a lot of misinformation about adaption of plants (not related to adaption gardening), sort of stars, moon and a little fairy dust. Ofcourse you can do adaption gardening right without knowing how things work, but personally I would like that there is some outreach, how to manual etc that are based on reality so that concept has credibility and isn’t corroded by wild takes by people who really haven’t even got into doing it. Not saying that what has been done isn’t that, but it’s a battle when community is growing rapidly. Whatever the name is there will be misunderstandings, that’s why I think better (as I have said in this topic or some other) that it’s better to give some nuts and bolts to new(er) people to the community to make it easier for them to understand how things work (or don’t work).
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We can still refer to landrace among ourselves. I use adaptation or landrace, agriculture or gardening, depending on my audience. My flyer has an explanation of landrace, so nothing is lost if they read it, but when I’m trying to convey basic concepts my audience gets lost in an explanation of a concept they’ve never heard of.
With a technical audience, or someone who already has an understanding of seed saving, I can give a one sentence explanation of landrace and they get it. Otherwise their eyes glaze over and I lose them.
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One aspect of our technical understanding of landraces that I appreciate being reminded of periodically in this forum is that a landrace does not necessarily need to be genetically diverse to successfully adapt to an environment. Mark Reed is one poster who sometimes points this out, using his broccolish brassica variety as an example.
My understanding is that many wild and feral lineages that are extremely well adapted to an environment turn out to be genetically uniform, and some cultivated landrace varieties that are also very well adapted to an ecological niche are also likely to be genetically uniform.
I will generalize by saying that people advocate for an approach to developing or improving landraces that definitely relies on genetic diversity plus mass selection to help a crop adapt to an environment. The end goal may be a landrace that maintains some genetic diversity – Joseph Lofthouse’s book advocates for this – but I think it is fair to argue that a genetically-diverse adaptive approach might justifiably lead to the development of landraces that do not have much genetic diversity and are as uniform as some of these wild types.
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Very True! I still really like the term landrace, in 1 word it says "Genetically adapted to the land’'.
Oh that’s a good point, why not just call it a heirloom mix? Many Heirloom flower mixes are already like landraces. You just simply expand the “true to type” to encompass more diversity.
Another term for them could be diversified heirlooms. I wonder if the bad rep F1s get is because the companies don’t want/encourage seed saving (Stuff like CMS don’t help).
True! The amount of “True to type” you want & is comfortable with your land/environment.
It really is “True to Type” on a desired trait rather than a specific cultivar.
Eventually yes, Natural Selection will select out all the unfit diversity. This is also why I think it’s important to bring in new genetics occasionally, over a long time some genetic stagnation may happen.
This brings up a bigger question, are species also in need of diversification? Are there any inbred species suffering from a lack of genetic diversity in their genepool? If they are wild, they are somehow surviving but imagine how much more with bringing 2 wild species or more together?
This maybe more advanced, but I’ve thought of Landrace Gardening as inventing your own subspecies of a crop. We as landrace Gardening are making our own species complex.
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Consider the scenario of introduced and/or invasive species.
The populations that form are often extremely genetically bottlenecked, sometimes coming from only a few individuals. But they happened to be extremely well adapted to whatever the local environmental conditions they escaped.
These populations over time have often become slightly varied from their origin populations, adapting to whatever small differences they experienced.
Couldn’t these also be considered “landrace” populations?
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I don’t like using other terms to make them appear something that they are not. Using heirloom would likely make some consider them to be heirlooms.
I think F1s have the reputation just because people aren’t very knowledgable on the topic. Heirloom is quite self explanatory, but F1 requires some knowledge and what people know is that it’s opposite or “destroying” heirlooms. People often are against things they don’t understand and which they feel go against something familiar. I have also heard people (very confidently) saying that F1s are the same as GMO and when I corrected they were very certain that at least they are (always) a cross between two species. Didn’t have anything more to say after I corrected again.
Like I said, I think it’s up to people to learn about things. People that have already made up their minds about how life should go aren’t a very good target audience no matter what terms you use. It should be up to them to change and not the terms to be more appealing to their preconcieved notion about life.
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