Conservation
Landraces are going extinct
Not as a figure of speech. The traditional drug populations of South and Central Asia are rated critically endangered in the literature, and the crossing that did it is still running.
What the research says
Two papers carry most of this. The first is the current classification of the traditional high-THC domesticates. The second resequenced 110 cannabis genomes to work out where everything now in cultivation came from.
“[Four traditional drug taxa] represent critically endangered reservoirs of germplasm … in urgent need of conservation.”
“[South and Central Asian drug Cannabis domesticates] have undergone widespread introgressive hybridization in the past 50 years. This has obliterated differences between hybridized ‘Sativa’ and ‘Indica’ currently available.”
“[Current hemp and drug cultivars] diverged from an ancestral gene pool currently represented by feral plants and landraces in China.”
Read together they say something narrow and bad. Everything sold as cannabis today descends from an ancestral pool that now survives only in landraces and feral populations, and those are the populations being crossed away.
What is doing it
Three pressures, none of them exotic. Imported hybrid seed pays better at market, so growers switch or cross, and a population that has been crossed for a few seasons stops being that population. Eradication burns standing fields in the places where enforcement still works that way. And the people who kept these lines are old, or their children have gone to the city, so the seed stops being saved for reasons that have nothing to do with cannabis at all.
None of these are reversible. Nobody gets a landrace back once the last household that kept it stops, and the seed is the smallest part of what goes. The rest is the fields and the farmers holding memories of a landscape we cannot bear to lose.
What we do about it
Collect while it is still there, and write down enough that the material stays meaningful after us. Every accession is a single collection, with the place, elevation, season, harvest year and the grower recorded against it. Seed without that record is just seed.
We rate every accession for conservation priority as we go. 63 of the 393 rated so far are critical and 106 more are high, which is how the collecting order gets set: the material most likely to be gone next season goes first.
We tried the centralised version and it did not work. A research station in Ron Phibun, growing endangered Thai landraces back out in one place, ran into Thailand's law changes and a cost of staying that stopped making sense. What replaced it is a network: landraces kept and regenerated by growers where they already live, moving between people who will look after them, documented in public as it goes. Slower and messier than a station, and closer to how these plants survived for the last few thousand years.
Why the record is public
Our accession numbers title articles on landrace.wiki, an independent encyclopaedia of landrace cannabis that covers far more than we hold. A number that resolves to a public article anyone can read, edit and argue with survives us going out of business. The full case for doing it that way is on the wiki page.
The conservation and documentation side is being set up as a French association loi 1901, separately from the shop. That split is legal in origin and useful in practice: the work that has to outlast the company is not inside the company.
Sources
- McPartland & Small (2020), A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives, PhytoKeys 144. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700
- Ren et al. (2021), Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa, Science Advances 7(29). doi:10.1126/sciadv.abg2286
This is what the patronage pays for
Seed sales do not cover a collecting trip. They never have. Patreon is what puts someone on a bus into the hills before the last household there stops saving seed.