3 ms·

Most vegetable seed you can buy is already a proprietary hybrid cross that doesn't seed back true anyway.

• Turing_Machine 10y ago
  Yes, exactly. The same even more true with grains, where the production of "organic" grain using heirloom varieties is even smaller than it is with vegetables (it's basically a rounding error). The bulk of seed grain is produced by specialized seed companies who hybridize Cool Variety #1 with Cool Variety #2 and sell the resulting seed which produces Cool Variety #3. The problem is that if you plant Cool Variety #3 seeds, only a minority of them will be Cool Variety #3. This is a real problem. If you kept growing the seeds for many generations, ruthlessly weeding out anything that didn't exhibit CV #3 traits, you'd eventually get something close to a pure CV #3 strain, but most farmers don't want to do that. Let's say that CV #1 is resistant to "gray-green rot" (made up names here), while CV #2 is resistant to "early leaf blight". CV #3 is resistant to both, thanks to having one GGR-resistant gene from CV #1 and one ELB-resistant gene from CV #2. But what happens if you grow CV #3 seeds? The kicker is that genes (usually) come in pairs. You'll get 25% offspring that are resistant to both (what you want), 25% resistant to GGR (but not ELB) 25% resistant to ELB (but not GGR), and 25% resistant to neither. If both GGR and ELB kill the plant, congratulations! You've managed to reduce your crop yield by 75%. That is why most modern farmers do not save seeds.